What Do You Think?

** Warning: this post is in part a copy of a post over on my other blog.  I reward you for your patience with a homely picture of myself in cute charming hat.  The photo does not do justice to the beauty of Timary's needlework or to the lovely colors and gloss of the yarn used (if I do say so, myself).  It just sort of hints at it.  You pays your money (or in this case, your attention) and you takes your chances, people...

Here is the darling beret that my brilliant friend Timary made for me.  It's a new design of hers, so I hadn't seen it before.  You can find her patterns (including this slouchy beanie beret) at her Etsy store right here.  Go ahead and check it out, especially if you are a crocheter - you'll be glad you did.

Thing is, when I got the hat she sent, I thought, "Ooo, FUN!!"  And then I thought, "Ooo, the colors are so ME!!"  And then I thought, "Ooo, this yarn is so soft and pretty!!"  And then I thought, "Hey, this yarn looks sort of familiar, actually..."  And then I realized... Timary bought my yarn a while back, and put a lot of work into making something out of it, AND THEN SENT IT BACK TO ME.  It was my own handspun yarn!!

So now I am going to send her more.  Some of it will be for her... and some of it will be for the really cute 20's Flapper Hat.  Because I don't crochet, and am not up to learning how at the moment, but she has designed one darling hat, I must say!!

So, what do you think?  Should I add a big fancy pin to one side?  Or just leave it as it is?

I also bought a couple really cute, silly, fun hats yesterday - just in time, since I lost about half my head overnight last night.  I'll model those soon, but I know you shouldn't be expected to handle so much feminine pulchritude at once.  (koff, koff...)

Now I have these really cute hats, and no place to store them properly (the only hat I've got stored/displayed currently is my floppy old straw hat, which is sitting on the head of my son's wooden rocking horse.  It's very fetching, but not very protected).  So if anybody just happens to have a nice big hatbox sitting around, and wants to donate it to a needy cause, I'm it.

The New Year Begins Nicely

Look at what I found in the mail last night!!!

This is the prize for the recent contest on the Knitty.com blog (click the blog link to see some really cool 'guerilla knitting' and other wonderful fiber-related stuff) - two lovely, soft, huggable skeins from the Loopy Ewe with which to make Cuckoo Mittens (click on the link to get the pattern for yourself - Knitty.com is a wonderful online magazine full of great patterns and informative articles.  Not only that, but they pay their designers decently and then provide the patterns to us for free.  Please support this community-minded effort by also supporting their advertisers and sponsors - we definitely want Knitty.com to stay around for a long, long time!)

I want to put in a special plug for the incredibly efficient and kindly folks at the Loopy Ewe.  They must have mailed off the package about one second after they got my address... and I almost suspect they asked Scotty to Beam It Up, it got to me so quickly.  Not only that, but the prize itself was only supposed to be the yarn - but as you can see, they thoughtfully added an extra special treat to the mix.  How cool is that?

On Handcrafts, Why We Need Them

Every once in a while somebody says something that makes you nod to yourself and think, "Yes, that's exactly how I feel!"  This wonderful bit of philosophy by Renate Hiller explains why we all need to use our hands to make bits of 'useful beauty' in the world:

Invisible

Why is it that I can never find my Chibi when I need it?

Just askin'...

Brown, Brown, Brown...

I WISH I had something brilliant to say. But it's been a bit boring around here.
Well, not completely boring. After all,

I unexpectedly received a truly fabulous bouquet from my generous (and beautiful) cousin and auntie...


I've spun some Just For Fun yarn...


I've hung around with two of my lovely women friends and with my particularly lovely mother...

So that was all interesting to me, although it's not all that interesting to the innocent bystander, I'm sure.

I've done the mundane workaday sorts of Mom stuff and Wife stuff, as well, but that would be even less interesting to the reader. It was not particularly enthralling for me, either. There's just so much thrill one can get out of grocery shopping and paying bills (or putting them aside and fretting about them).

But lately it seems to me that I've mostly been endlessly spinning brown alpaca fleece. Brown alpaca fleece that has small bits of VM that I have to laboriously pick out of my yarn every couple inches or so. At least, I pick out the bits that get caught in the yarn. A lot of it just falls out of the fiber as I spin, so that I and the surrounding square footage end up covered in a brown snow of grot.

Vegetable matter, for those non-fiber folks amongst my readers, is what we fiber folks call the bits of grass and burrs and other stuff that ends up in fiber when the animal who used to wear it lived on the actual dirt-enhanced Earth, rather than on a fluffy pink cloud.

Not that I'd mind getting a bit of fluffy pink cloud caught up in my fiber. It would add visual interest. This fiber is pretty much uniformly brown. Not a lot of variation. It's not that it's a bad brown, or anything. But I've never been a fan of brown, and this alpaca is really determinedly set in its basic unsubtle brownness. If it wasn't for the fact that leaving the VM in would render the yarn fit only for a particularly penitent knitter bent on knitting the equivalent of a Hair Shirt, I would leave the grass and burrs in, to lend a bit of color.

In my infinite wisdom, when starting this project out I decided to continue in my largely unsuccessful attempts to learn the art of Navajo Plying. Navajo Plying gives you a 3-ply yarn (one with bumps and weird spots, if the spinner is me), which means that the yarn can be pretty darned chunky if you don't spin the original singles fairly finely. Chunky plain brown yarn is pretty useless, IMO, and the shorter length involved wouldn't give me the practice at Navajo Plying that I need in order to master the skill. So I am laboriously spinning (and picking through) a large bobbin full of miles and miles and miles of lace-weight brown.

It's taking forever. I may expire of fiber-induced ennui. And the worst thing is that I know that once I get through with that, I will then be facing miles and miles and miles of brown that needs laborious and inept plying. At which point I will have a skein of lumpy, weird, puritanical yarn that nobody in their right minds would want to actually use, much less buy.

Clearly I am driven by some psychological compulsion to continue with this dreary and seemingly endless pas de deux with the drab Willi of brown, brown, brown...


I hope it's a reflection of newly-forged virtues of Persistence and Determination or perhaps some slightly nutty form of Optimism (maybe it will turn out better than I expect?), rather than an indication of a compulsive mood disorder or creeping fiber-induced insanity.

In the meantime, I will never get on to something more interesting if I don't get on with it. You stay here to keep an eye on things. If I don't come out in a week or so, call for help.

An Ad I Can Watch. More Than Once.

First there's the making of the ad. Then there's the ad, which is short and sweet.

I think you'll see why it's my kind of commercial interruption...

Shepherd's Harvest!!

Yes, it's almost that time of year again, folks!

On Mother's Day weekend, the good folks of Minnesota (and specifically, of Lake Elmo) put on a big shindig for us fiber fanatics. At the Shepherd's Harvest Sheep & Wool Festival you can see demonstrations of all sorts - sheep herding by those clever dogs, sheep shearing by that clever shearer, spinning by those clever spinners, knitting and weaving and rug hooking and felting and crocheting by those clever textile artists, cooking of lamb by that clever chef, music played by those talented musicians.

You can try out the equipment yourself at the various booths. You can go to the fashion show. You can eat wonderful lamb burgers and other wonderful treats. You can buy all sorts of supplies, fibers, tools, clothing, and various other goodies. You can admire and sometimes pet llamas, alpacas, sheep, goats, and bunnies. You can learn a lot about wool and handspun yarn by checking out the various competitions, and sometimes you can get a good deal if you bid on the wool from the wool competition. You can indulge yourself and give to a good cause at the same time by bidding at the charity auction. If you are clever and act quickly, you can sign up online for wonderful classes in everything from dyeing to knitting to basketry and rug hooking.

Best of all (from my point of view), you can see ME. And my folks (buy their lovely book - they'll even sign it specially for you). And Denise, and Jane, and Pam, and maybe even Nancy.

I'll be selling spinning wheels, yarn, the wonderful Timary's patterns and products, and who knows what else. I will also be demonstrating, and I'll be chatting with you, if you come. So put it down on your calendars now - I'll meet you there!

No News...

General update on my life can be found here.

On the Crafting front:

I'm plotting several knitting projects, all of which are gorgeous and perfect and charming and completely doable... because they are currently in the 'theoretical' stage that comes well before the actual 'planning' stage, and eons before the fun 'going insane in the Local Yarn Store' stage, and (blessedly) light years before the 'flinging self prostrate on the floor and pitching a fit because there is NO WAY that this #@&# thing is ever going to get finished before the end of the century' stage.

This fog of happy delusion is not the least bit dissipated by the fact that I already have two projects on the needles that are currently at the fit-pitching stage.

One is a scarf intended for my sister, made of a handspun yarn that is getting a bit ragged, having been completely knit up and then completely frogged TWICE. I do not seem able to admit to the obvious fact that there is not enough yarn there for a scarf, and I will either have to add some complimentary commercial yarn to the project or scrap the entire thing and instead knit up little tiny scarves for my sister's birds. The purchase of commercial yarn and a thorough re-design is of course the logical choice.

I'm trying to figure out whether there is enough yarn in my handspun skein to make some teensy matching beak-warmers.

My other project is an afghan intended for my aunt and uncle. I am at the stage where I am supposed to pick up 121 stitches for the edging at the top of the blanket. I have picked up 148, ripped back, picked up 89, ripped back, picked up 113, ripped back, picked up 134, ripped back.

Now, of course any sane person would have admitted defeat and divided up the edge into marked sections by at least that 89 stitch fiasco. But not me. I am made of thicker sterner stuff. It takes at least four abject failures before I cry 'uncle!' and admit that running headlong into a brick wall is not the only way to get out of a building...

Maybe there's a reason I'm not rich and famous by now. It's just possible that I'm not always as practical as I could be.

Sticky

FINALLY, the ground is cold enough that some little bit of the snow is sticking. This is bad for us, because we don't have the leaves off the part of our back yard that we definitely don't want even slightly composted (no weeds growing between the pretty river stones, please). This is good for The Pretty.


Not that the snow is thick enough to be pretty really, and it is likely to melt again in a day or so, but it's a harbinger, one hopes, of the near future. Once I have to turn on the stupid furnace, I like snow outside - at least, I like it on this side of winter. No promises about how I'll feel in February.

In other news, here's the latest production, still on the bobbin, ready to be washed/set.

It's probably the lightest gauge I've ever spun, pretty much laceweight, I think. Assuming it doesn't puff up a lot in the wash. I will be selling it on the etsy site - to see what I've got for sale now, click the button on the top left of this site, it will take you there. Go look just for The Pretty, even if you aren't in the market...

What have YOU been doing during the past week?

Intermission

For some reason, my photos are coming out in all directions on blogger today, which makes it difficult to continue my story. Hopefully this will right itself by tomorrow...

In the meantime, I am celebrating my first sale at my Etsy store! I LOVE my first customer**; if I could put her in a frame and keep her forever, I would. As it is, I sent her an extra treat or two, and send you on to visit her own Etsy store and her blog... one good turn deserves another.

And of course, if you felt like moseying over to my own store, I'd love to hear what you think.

It may be cold and gloomy, but it's sunny smiles and moonbeams here at Casa Knot All That!


**Thanks, Timary!!

Nerves. And Stuff.

So this is the first time I am going to be trying to sell my skeins.

My folks are going to take a selected group of skeins and felted catnip toys to the North Country Fiber Fair this weekend. I had no idea how to price them, so I just took a wild guess - I can only hope that people don't laugh mockingly when they look at my stuff. I'm all nerves - eek!!

In the meantime, here's what I'm up to:

Spinning 50/50 Merino & Silk...

And knitting donations for a very important Benefit Auction that is coming up. I will post more next week, when I get all the details.

I'll let you know how things went at the Fiber Fair, too. Wish me luck!

Must...Have...Caffeine...

For the last couple hours I've been feeling as though I was living in one of those scenes you see in movies on occasion, the ones where the hero/heroine goes into shock or is drugged by the baddie, and suddenly everything is slowed down and goes all fuzzy**. It only occurred to me now that this is because I've been so busy this morning that I forgot to eat OR DRINK anything. NOW everything makes sense - I am suffering from Caffeine Deficiency Syndrome. I must administer the appropriate treatment immediately...

Ah, that's better. I think my eyes are more or less in focus, now. On with the blog!

First of all, if you haven't done so, please do yourself a favor and check out the comments for my contest post - these stories are great!! And of course, if you haven't done so already, leave a comment of your own there, and enter the contest...


In the meantime, look at this!! This is an announcement that came in my mail yesterday - an announcement from the lovely Pam at The Fiber Studio, touting the book reading/signing that she is sponsoring at the Anodyne Coffeehouse in Minneapolis on Wednesday, Sept. 17, at 7pm. The authors, of course, being my estimable parents, who are entertaining speakers, wonderful authors, and fun to socialize with afterwards. I will be there, too, so stop on by and say hello!


Pam is also going to have free weaving, spinning, and feltmaking demos at her amazing shop (how does she fit all that glorious treasure in one smallish space? the woman is a wizard!) on the following weekend (Sept. 20-21), and also has her new Fall Classes up on the shop website, so check those out as well - you'll be glad you did.


**Fuzzy. Hmm. My eyes are focused now, but everything *still* looks fuzzy. It might be time to vacuum...