Happy New Year

I am spinning out the old year and in the new one. I am working on my next project. That is happiness for me. I am tired of people asking me if I made my sweater when I have to say no. So I found a new pattern I would like to make and I am spinning up the yarn for it. It is all luxury yarns with mohair, and silk and cashmere. So I am spinning up those fibers which I have in abundance, thanks to Kathy Withers. And I will be knitting a new sweater before you know it. I will have to get more dye though. I wonder what color to make it?

I also washed some icelandic fleece today. One less bag of the smelly stuff. It was looking bad and I was worried that it was molding or something. It washed up lovely, soft and mostly snowy white. So all is well and I just have to decide what to do with all that icelandic fleece. It's pretty nice but how much icelandic can you spin?

Time to go to bed and dream of my new sweater. Some of the yarn is already drying in the bathroom. I will make more tomorrow.

Experiment in color

I decided to try a scarf with stripes of color with 3 strands of different yarn knitted together. It turned out rather well in my opinion. It will go to one of my son's girlfriend.

I am also still working on the lace scarf but running low on yarn so I'll have to wrap it up soon. It's not very long. I can block it a bit bigger though. It's very pretty.

Lace scarf

This is a picture of the scarf I designed and am knitting from my own handspun cobweb yarn. It's one of my favorite colors and so soft. I started it on the long trek to Kansas.

It will look better after I block it. It is spun 2 ply from Border Leichester lambs wool and Angora blended together. I will just keep knitting until I run out of yarn. It will be a short scarf. But pretty and warm too.

I finished my sweater and will do pictures of that soon.

In kansas

I am in Kansas this Thanksgiving for a family reunion. I taught my 7 year old cousin to spin. Plus we did some string games. I took a picture of her with her first Jacob's Ladder.

I also found another older cousin who was interested in spinning. She knits and was facinated by my spinning.

I also wrote a new lace scarf pattern that I am making now for a prototype. Family get-togethers have lots of down time so I've been creative.

Moving!

I moved this weekend, 15 miles north to a smaller, less expensive house. The worst part was that I had to face my fiber addiction as I pulled boxes and bags of fiber out of cabinets and cubby holes to move them. I have a 10 x 12 room in my new house that is filled with 3 feet high boxes and bags with just a path to the window. How on earth will I ever manage to get all that unpacked and organized? Plus the garage will not fit a car just yet.

I felt like I was in the twilight zone with unending boxes to unpack and no matter how many I did, there was more to do. I do have one room kind of organized, but I will be working on this for weeks to come. So no more playing with fiber until I get it all organized! Or, maybe not too much playing with fiber. The good part is that you see all the stuff that you did not remember you had. :-) So it will be fun. Wish me luck!

Piles of Fiber!

Here is Kathy digging through her piles of new fleeces. All of them were fabulous. The wool festival was a success even though the temp was 99 degrees. It was great and well attended.

Patagonia

Saturday I went with Kathy to the Patagonia Fall Festival. They had many vendors there and lots of goodies to buy. I managed not to buy the place out but I saw a lot of wonderful artwork and stuff I'd love to have.

I was exhausted by the end of the day from doing spinning demos and talking to people. I'm not used to talking that much for that long. LOL. But it was fun. I think Kathy sold some things and I can't tell you how many people said they'd come to the wool festival next weekend. So it was a successful show. Beautiful weather too. And it was a lovely area.