Fiber Revival

On Saturday the boy and I braved the heat and headed out to Fiber Revival in Newbury MA. We saw some lovely alpaca--and I really did want to take one home.

I met Julia Farwell-Clay and Alison Green Will--both very nice. I also bumped into my knitting pal Paulette, just as we were leaving.

We saw lots of spinners.

And some weavers.

And I did not leave empty handed.

Later that afternoon we went to the pool. Some dragonflies really liked where I was sitting and kept coming to rest on me. Some nearby kids were super impressed and wanted to know how I called them :)

For number one, you've got to sit still!! Which these kids had a hard time doing--but they finally got the hang of it, and the dragonflies came to them too. They must have thought it was some sort of magic. I'd sit there knitting for a while, then stick my hand up and a dragonfly would land on my finger. It was fun.

I'm back

The cicadas are buzzing, the sun is shining, there is a cool breeze and I won't have to cook dinner--what a great day, if only I wasn't so swamped at work.

We were away for a while, resulting in the lack of posts recently. We tool a road trip of the northeast where we spent time with family and friends. It was great.

I stressed out about what knitting to bring. In the end I brought two potential scarf projects. I tried to start one early in the trip, promptly got a migraine that night, and put down my knitting for the rest of my travels. So, I lost about 10 days of knitting time, but it was such a good 10 days it hardly matters.

I'm back to working on my Tilted Duster and here is how it looks now. Just two more repeats of the skirt before I start thinking about the collar.

In the mail came a lovely package of Kool Aid dyed yarn from Destiknit.

Lovely stuff--but my favorite are the tiny little "hand made" hands. I'm looking forward to using those!

Tomorrow I hope to get the boy out to the Fiber Revival to check out some spinning. If I take any pictures, you'll see them.

Results of the Re-dye

Here are the results of my overdyeing efforts last week. A bit better than before, but now due to felting, I guess this yarn will be used for felted projects. I've already gotten a request for kid sized felted slippers.

The Tilted Duster is moving along--sorry, no pictures. I have completed the 6th (out of 10) repeats in the skirt, and I think it is looking pretty cool. I will redo the shoulder seams, since I'm not happy with them. I already did those seams 2-3 times each, but I'm afraid that bad seams will totally ruin all the work for this sweater. I'm not looking forward to putting in the set-in sleeves. I haven't done that in a long long time, and I never particularly liked doing it.

And finally, can you see this little guy? His body is about the size of my thumbnail. He has been hanging out near the light at our front door during rainstorms. Eat up the bugs, buddy.

Tilted Duster progress

The Tilted Duster is coming along nicely--but I've hit a snag--I've got to do some sewing to move on. I can't believe how many years it has been since I've made a sweater that needed sewing!!

Dyeing instead of Letterboxing

The plans for Sunday were to meet up with a bunch of people and go letterboxing. It was a glorious day here in New England, so of course the boy woke up with a fever--sigh.
So instead I spent the day dyeing.
This is some yarn I dyed for a swap. I started with this:


I learned that Louet Gems fingering weight Merino is WAY overspun, and when it hits the water it twists up on itself.


But I think the color (Kool Aid) turned out nice.


I also did some color correction on the yarn I tried to dye green a few weeks ago--it is now greener. Unfortunately, by the end of it all, I was so tired I tossed it on a delicate laundry bag and tried spinning it out in the washer. Well, guess what, Knit Picks Peruvian Highland Bulky felts very very easily. Another 2 minutes and it would have been unusable. As it stands, I was able to rip it apart and ball it all up, but I think this wool is destined for felted projects--maybe some kiddie felted slippers or the Lucy Bag. I didn't take any pictures though--will try to do that.

Dream catcher

This post is not about knitting, but there was some crochet cotton involved and certainly plenty of crafting.

For quite a while my son has been asking me for a dream catcher. He doesn't seem to have many bad dreams, but he seems to think he does. And I'm not quite sure where he learned about dream catchers.

I went looking around. What I found was not to my liking; too gussied up, too much stuff, too sparkly or just not my thing. So I decided to try to make one--that way too I could customized it, my son's favorite color is green. I found only one good site with info on how to make one. There might be more out there, but once I found this one I knew I had hit the jackpot.

I found this site with good information:

http://www.native-languages.org/dreamcatchers.htm

which led to this site, with directions:

http://www.nativetech.org/dreamcat/dreminst.html

I needed some dried grape vine and some feathers. I found the feathers at AC Moore--but no grapevine. I found the grapevine at Michael's. I used a mini grapevine wreath--the kind you take home to decorate yourself, and soaked it and untwisted it. I can probably make several dreamcatchers from this $0.59 wreath. I bought a smaller one because you really need rather thin grapevine--dream catchers should not be bigger than an adult hand (who knew). Oh, and I also bought some nice beads, since I thought the seeds beads I had might be too small. So for approximately $5 I bought enough materials to make a whole bunch of dream catchers--though so far I've only made one.

Here is what it looks like.

It is currently hanging above my son's bed--I hope it is doing its job.

ps I just noticed the bird poop next to my front door--sorry about that, guess I need to do some cleaning up. Can you tell from our door knocker that we have a lot of birds around.

A good laugh

OK, this is not about knitting--but a blog that I wanted to share, in case you don't already know about it. I've been following it for the past year or so, sporadically--but more frequently in the past month. If you haven't yet heard of it, go to
http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/
Most days there are posting of wrecks, but one day a week she posts the opposite of wrecks, and those are pretty cool too, though not as funny.

I started the Tilted Duster the other night. So far so good. I have completed the back and the right front. I hope to finish the left front tonight, leaving the arms for the weekend.