Handspun Update

I have some handspun to share with you today!

Two of these I finished in the fall around the time when I started going to all the woolly events. I ran out of time for photos and organizing a post together, so they kind of fell by the wayside while I was going to different places. One of these I finished last week, so I thought I ought to get the photos together and post them all at once.


Dark Brown Alpaca Handspun



I bought this wool from a local craft fair. I can't remember the name of the vendor or if they even had a card, but it was 2 oz of dark brown alpaca from a farm only a town or two from where I live. It was a lovely wool to spin - very smooth - and I hope to see more from this farm in the future.



Monochrome Handspun



Over the summer, my family and I went down to Pennsylvania for some vacation time. My parents and youngest brother went down to visit some family and meet us down in a little town where we were staying for the Renaissance Faire. While my parents were there, they bought us all a gift and they bought me 3 oz of 100% pure wool in white, grey, and black, which was fun to spin.



Nevada Sands Handspun



This yarn was spun out of Burgis Brook alpaca that I picked up at the Coventry Farmer's Market this past September. One 2 oz bag was white and the other 2 oz back was white with little dyed spots of orange and yellow. This was a beautiful spin. It was really interesting to see how the colors spun up.



I have more wool on the wheel, which I'm really excited to show you. Also, I have a couple of different colorways in the works since I got new bobbins for Christmas! :D



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New England Fiber Festival (Sheep and Wool)

The first weekend in November I went up to the New England Fiber Festival for the first time! By myself!


I'm really glad that this fell right after Halloween. I was so focused on getting Halloween done right that I really only had one night to panic about going up to Massachusetts for a sheep and wool festival on my own. Only one night to compare driving directions and spot out places to stop in emergencies and make my short list of things that I'm allowing myself to buy.

I never go to new places by myself. I've always had a friend or sibling or parent to go to a new place with me, but I drove myself up to Massachusetts (I'm in CT) to the Eastern States Expo groups for this festival! I was actually surprised at how easy it was for me to get there. I mean, I missed the turning for the parking lot and had to turn around and then I had to have a terrible three minutes fumbling with my car door and a five dollar bill at the parking booth wherein I dropped my five bucks into a puddle and had to chase it a little bit all because my driver's side window doesn't roll up and down properly. But I made it! And I loved it!

The first part of the festival space had a huge space of raw fiber that was submitted... for competition? I don't know. I walked into that area on the wrong side and didn't read the sign. I was a little overwhelmed on my own. But there were a bunch of alpacas grouped with booths in this first part, so I calmed myself down greeting those guys. I made my first purchase right away.



Tada! Soap and hand lotion. I haven't used the soap yet, but soaps like this have been all I use for the past year and a half and they're great. I tested out this hand lotion at the booth and it made my hands a little greasy after applying it, but it really worked well other than that. I put this little jar upstairs so I can use it while I'm spinning. A little bit of greasy hands there is actually a help, so I'm excited to get back to spinning.


It took me a while to make my second purchase. This booth was in the very middle of the whole festival, so there was about an hour between my first purchase and this purchase. But this is actually the thing I brought home that I'm most excited about:




Look at that thing. LOOK AT IT. This booth sold dyed roving by weight. So I could have bought any amount of roving I wanted.

That is a 1 lb 4 oz ball of roving. It's the size of a basketball. It's giant. 20 oz. For comparison, the kind of standard weight for roving sold is about 4 oz. And it was half the price I normally pay for roving. I just plucked this thing off the shelf and put it on the scale and the vendor thought it was great that I was just going to buy the whole thing.

My plan is the spin this into a ridiculous amount of yarn and make the Maple Leaf Shawl. It's going to be absurd.

For a size reference, here's a photo with my hand and a photo with a Reese's peanut butter cup.



Ridiculous.


And then I finished walking through the festival. It took nearly two hours to go through the whole place. I then back tracked to a couple of booths and ended up purchasing this beautiful green yarn from a booth that had a huge fake tree canopy with yarn hanging from it. It was lovely. And this yarn is a one of a kind dye, so I'm really pleased.





And then I had to scoot on out of there because the crowd had doubled over the time I was there and it was too much. But I got the things I was really looking for and it was a great experience and I'm really glad I went. Mom's already told me that she's going to reserve a weekend off next year for this event. I'm excited to share it with her.


And that was my last yarn event of the year! Huzzah!



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Some Finished Stuff Rushed in Before the Christmas Knitting

1. A Bigger Twist

Pattern : A Bigger Twist by Michelle Krause

Needles: US 8 - 5.0 mm

Yarn: Some beautiful grey wool from the Palmer Family Farm in Tolland, CT that I picked up at the Coventry Farmers Market





2. Yarn Dreads Commission

My brother's friend K has dreads and was impressed with the yarn falls she saw at the Connecticut Renaissance Faire. She asked me about making some yarn dreads for her and these are the finished dreads as modeled by my fantastic Jack Sparrow wig on a foam head.

Yarn Stash Expansion

I meant to start posting this stuff earlier, but I went off to DISNEY WORLD with friends so I stopped caring about blogging for a while. I will do a post about that, but I'm still getting over the magic withdrawal.

So here's some yarny things instead!


Connecticut Renaissance Faire

(Which I went to in the beginning of October. Whoops.)

The thing that I probably love most about the Connecticut Renaissance Faire is that, no matter its shortcomings, there has always been a booth with yarn for sale for as long as I've been going. It used to be The Merry Little Lamb, but they haven't been there for a few years. Since The Merry Little Lamb's been out, there has been a booth with three or four crafters that has had exceptional yarn (as well as some cool leather masquerade masks and things). This year I picked up some Mermaid yarn:





And some bright orangey roving:




Stitches East 2013

Awww yeah. Stitches East is at the Hartford Convention Center these days and since I drive into Hartford for work five days a week, it was no big thing to plan on going this year with me mum. We had originally planned on going today because The Gabbers was going to come up and go with us, but those plans fell through so Mom and I drove up to Hartford yesterday on one of my days off to go see what's what.

IT WAS GLORIOUS. So much yarn and so many friendly people. I don't think I've ever felt so welcome in a crowd before. Not even at nerdy type conventions. Everyone was smiling and there was no judgement if you had questions and every person in each booth was like, "OH! THIS IS SO SOFT! HAVE YOU FELT THIS ONE YET? RUB THIS SKEIN ON YOUR FACE AND FEEL HOW SOFT IT IS! :DDDDDDD"

Although, my favourite part was honestly when an older lady was fighting with her phone, looked up and around, spotted me, and practically dove into the booth we were walking through all like "YOUNG MAN, I JUST GOT THIS PHONE. DO YOU KNOW HOW TO MAKE IT A CAMERA? THIS PATTERN DOESN'T COME WITH A PHOTO AND I NEED A PHOTO OF THIS SHAWL ON THIS MANNEQUIN." And she just handed me her iPhone. No hesitation and completely trusting that I would just show her how to use it. Which I did, of course. And she danced back to take as many photos of that shawl as she pleased. It was great.

But Mom and I knew we were in trouble when one of the first booths we stopped into had this little table with all these lovely fall colored yarns, picked up some skeins to check them out, and found out that all the colorways were named after places in Middle Earth.

I shelled out $50.88 dollars right there for some Baranduin and Rohan, which is below. My mom busted out about half of that for a skein of Lothlorien.



After that, we determined that we would not buy anything until we had gone through and looked at all of the other booths to see what was available. So we spent a lot of time wandering and smooshing yarn and we split up to go back to our favourite booths.

I got this skein of Dragon sock yarn in color Hidalgo at Dragonfly Fibers:



Some Malabrigo roving for spinning from The Yarn Barn:



But the best deal that I got wandering around was from Holiday Yarns, who had a big ol' plastic bin of mini-skeins at the front of their booth with a sign advertising $20.00 for as much as you could fit in your hand. So I grabbed this:



I'm planning on something stripey with those suckers. I'm pretty excited about it.



And that's about it for my yarn purchasing adventures over the past month. Other than yarn for Christmas presents. But, of course, I cannot show you anything I'm gifting for Christmas until after it has been gifted. So there won't be a lot of finished things to show off on the blog for a while.

But I do have some things in the pipelines for the blog. I do have a couple of other projects I finished in October to show off. I have the Disney World post. And I will be seeing two movies this weekend, so I should have some reviews up for them soon enough.

Stay tuned!

Handspun, Man Soap, and Ray Guns

1. Handspun

Been kicking myself into gear for the past couple of weeks into getting my handspun stuff spun and up at My Etsy Shop, so here it is! This is all up and live and for sale now!

Anduin:


Smaug:


Delirium:




Lollipop Guild:


Tesseract:



And I've still got roving to finish up, so... exciting!


2. Man Soap


I'm on a handmade soap kick because the shower gels and stuff were really making my eczema Hulk out on me. I've been mostly buying stuff from local craft fairs and such. Pretty much every person I've talked to got into making soap because of similar skin conditions, so I've been in pretty good hands, but there was a gap in the craft fair season where I was nearing the end of a bar of soap and I might not be able to make it to the next craft thing on my list because of possible wisdom teeth extraction, so I decided to stock up a bit.

These are from Elegant Rose Boutique. It sounds like a fancy, feminine soap place, but they also have neutral things and masculine things. I went with the Man Soap gift set.


3. Ray Guns


I definitely just impulse!bought this ray gun knitting bag. Yep.

All My Monies

All of my monies get sucked right out of my wallet when I'm anywhere near a craft store. Michael's has been sending out promotional emails for some huge clearance business that's been going on recently. Yesterday, one of those emails sank right into my bones and I couldn't shake it.

So I went to Michael's.



4 skeins for $5 deal. Cotton. For more washcloths. And/or dish towels.



3 canvas zipper bags for $2. The bicycle one is holding on to some miscellaneous knitting swag, like these plastic netting things my mom bought for me a couple of years ago to keep skeins for tangling too horribly. The other two are for stitch markers and needles and things that I can toss into project bags.


Not pictured here are some other purchases of tags and packaging and ink for Etsy product packaging.


Let's just be glad I avoided the Barnes and Noble a few store fronts down.


ALSO LOKI:



:D

Birthdays, Washcloths, and Compulsive Knitting

1. Birthday




Things I Received For My 25th Birthday:

• A Sock Loom in order to, and I quote, "Finish some socks quickly." Apparently, my mother is well aware of the sock yarn and patterns lying huddled throughout my stash.
  
  
• But then, of course, she adds to it with some green sock yarn.
  
  
• Scoundrels by Timothy Zahn
  
  
• Thor: Legend of the Magical Hammer. My love for a) bad movies, b) magic/myth movies, and c) animated things is well known. "I saw it in the store and immediately thought of you," Mom laughed. (It was awful and amazing. I'm pretty sure "Crusher" the Magic Hammer was being toted around by a leprechaun, but jock!Heimdall kept calling him a fat elf so I was distracted by the lulz)
  
  
• $20 JoAnn Fabrics gift card. "No idea when you'll ever have the chance to spend that," Dad laughed. It's only got $1.04 left on it.

2. Washcloths


They're lopsided and uneven and ugly, but I like them. Not bad for a first try, I'd say. I have to admit, I was surprised at how easy they were to hem.

3. Compulsive Knitting

I knit four of these cabled curtain ties because I didn't want to stop watching the Iron Man Armored Adventures on Netflix. Yep.

Bonus
I bought this yarn earlier. I don't need it. I don't have space for it. But I wanted it desperately.

It's called "Loki."