Finally back in the Blog World.

Well, life has been hectic, but the semester is over!  FREEDOM!
So what have I been doing since I’ve been out?  Spinning.

I noticed recently that spinning is taking over my life, and I love it.  :)  Knitting and crochet still happen, but those are things I tend to take with me when I’m out and about.  So much easier to haul around than a spinning wheel.  Now for the pictures!

The CTH I was spinning is finally finished!  There are 3 larger skeins, and two little tiny ones.  This picture was taken before I washed it which it has so much bounce still in it.  I love spinning and plying tightly because it gives such a nice squishy quality to the yarn.  After I washed it the yarn did calm down a bit, and right now it’s hanging in the bathroom drying.  This will probably be going up in my etsy shop after it’s dry and I can get some better pictures.  As much as I love the colors and the texture of the yarn, the original purpose of making socks for my sister just won’t work with this yarn.  My sister needs something superwash, because she is the queen at felting socks.  And it’s not that she felts them while washing them, she felts them while wearing them on her feet.

The Lincoln/Mohair blend that I bought back in early 2007 is almost done as well! I finished up those three skeins yesterday, and theres only a small bit of fiber left! If you enlarged the CTH picture any, you might have seen the little bits of fiber all over it. Yea, apparently this lincoln/mohair REALLY sheds.  The whole shedding thing is really driving me crazy, as I’m sure you can all imagine.  The good thing though is that the random bits of fluff are all on the outside of the yarn, it’s not like they’ve been spun in with it.  So it will be very easy to remove later.

And now for one last picture. My new knitting/fiber basket:

I love having a basket to carry around with me.

Well that’s all for now. Hopefully I’ll be back more often with updates and more substance to my posts.

Spinning!

Yea, so I’ve still been plugging away at the sweater.  Can’t say very much is getting done since school has started back in full force.  Although there hasn’t been tons of homework, there has been tons of reading which I guess is homework too.  All that work means not so much of the fiber fun.  Yesterday though I did sit at the wheel and push another bobbin of that orange lincoln/mohair blend off of it so that I could get started on some work spinning that showed up in the mail yesterday.  (The work spinning is probably the reason you haven’t seen much knitting since last March.)

Picture of BOTH skeins of the orange stuff that got completed this month.  The one of the right I finished back around the 1st of the month and the other was finished yesterday.  I’m still debating about what I want to do with these.  Part of me wants to throw them in my etsy shop and just get them out of the stash now, but another part of me wants to keep them until November for the guild booth at a local craft/art sale.  I wasn’t able to participate in the guild sale last year because I just didn’t have anything that I felt was quality enough to really sell, and this year I REALLY want to participate.  So I think they’ll be in the stash for a few months while I collect up some handspun.  Worse comes to worse if it doesn’t sell at the guild table I’ll throw it into etsy and open the yarn up to the masses of the internet.

Also in the exiting mail of yesterday I got my KNITPICKS ORDER!

I know… I was really excited. 
Apparently I live under a rock and didn’t know that Knitpicks sold bigger chords than the ones that came with the options set.  So I was sitting around COMPLAINING about two weeks ago about this fact that they *only* had up to the 38 inch and someone pointed out the fact that they went up to a 60 inch. 

First I thought she had NO idea what I was talking about, but upon everyone else in the chat room agreeing with her and me going to over to the KnitPicks site I discovered that they did in fact have MORE sizes!  I can’t tell you how excited I was.  So of course I got one set of each of the larger sizes and was then shocked to realize that each pack contained two chord thingies!  (Note:  If I would have actually READ the site I would have known that each contained two, but apparently I cannot read when I’m not in school.)

January 1st!

Happy 2008 everybody!

Now to start on those resolutions.

The most interesting one to blog about is the yarn stash reduction!  Currently in the stash I have 22,217 grams, or about 49 pounds, of yarn.  That includes all my handspun, all my sock yarn and my mounds of acrylic.  As far as the fiber stash goes, it currently contains 197.3 oz or 12.3 pounds.  That’s a scary amount of yarn things.

So take note in those numbers!  I’ll be back with updates on them as I finish thing and move yarn out of the stash.  :)  I already have tons of project ideas in mind, now I’ll just have to find the time to complete them.

ETA:  I noticed while adding some new handspun to my spreadsheet today that apparently I had one skein that was at the bottom of my list!  Where the yardages and weight weren’t being counted.  So I updated my numbers. 

ETA2:  While looking over the spreadsheet today I found that I had more yarn down than I truely had in my stash!  So I fixed my typo. 

Happy New Years EVE!!

Happy New Years EVE everybody!

So in honor of the new year let’s reflect on the resolutions I made last year:

1. Get yarn down to two bins by September (That was a goal I set last September. I don’t think it’s going to happen but I’m going to try the best I can. As long as the stash goes down a little, I’ll consider it an accomplishment.)   This whole Knit from the stash 2007 should really help with that though. HAHAHA!  In fact my stash has probably increased.  I tried.  I did the whole “knit from your stash 2007″ thing and you know what, sock yarn and roving were exceptions… exceptions that I LOVED.  That’s probably why the whole yarn diet thing didn’t work. 

2. Participate in the KALs that I sign up for. Or at least as much as I can seeing as how college tends to get in the way of my fun. Stupid school work.  I started off good, did it once or twice, then started spinning like crazy and watched my knitting time disappear.

3. Start Christmas presents early (maybe summer), and don’t make things where I have to worry about peoples sizes. (aka. DON’T TRY TO KNIT EVERYONE SOCKS. Scarves are good, possibly some stuff knit out of handspun.)  Did the vegan fox scarf for my sister’s birthday.  Other than that there was no x-mas knitting.4.  Knit with my handspun.  It will not melt if I try to work with it….. I should not be so afraid of it… really.  Hehe… didn’t do that either.  I was planning on knitting with some of it, but it just never happened.Yup… I didn’t really do any of them like I had planed on.So now to make some goals for 2008!

• I will use up more yarn than I bring in.  I’m measuring this by weight since a lot of my acrylic doesn’t have yardages listed.  I’ve made a very detailed spreadsheet of all the stuff in my stash including the acrylic!  I even got rid of 3 of those plastic grocery bags full of acrylic.  I’m not going to say that I won’t buy yarn, because I’m sure I will, I just don’t want to have MORE next January than I do now.
• I’m going to eat healthier and get more active this year.  Not so much a “I will loose weight” goal but a “I’m going to get healthy” goal.
• I’m going to save money.  I don’t make tons with work and I have a scary amount of yarn.  So really knitting up the stuff I already have means less money spent on yarn.

Now for pictures of the scary yarn and fiber stash!  Pictures that will hopefully keep me from buying more this year.

Acrylic! AHH!  Funny thing is some of the stuff in that picture I actually decided to get rid of after taking the picture.  So the fun fur is gone, the pinkish/purple yarn ball is also gone and the blue one by it also left. 

Here is the acrylic baby yarn stash.  Mr. Oreo decided he was going to jump into the photo and since he wasn’t blocking anything I let him stay.  Really it’s not tons.  The stuff that looks really old on the right side is stuff that belonged to my great aunt who died before I was born and that stuff I’m always keeping.

One picture of the natural fibers yarn stash.  AKA non-acrylic. 

2nd picture of non-acrylic yarn. 

Last picture of non-acrylic yarn.  As you can see I couldn’t fit it all in one picture.  Yea… the last picture is mostly handspun… handspun that I haven’t knit with yet. 

Now for the fiber stash!  This one did not need 3 pictures… it only needed 2. 

Picture number 1.

Picture number 2.  Now I’m going to go take all these lovely pictures of mine and make a background for my computer that way I can see my stash at ALL HOURS OF THE DAY! 

lonely handspun

I finally did it.  I finally went and listed the one skein of handspun in that etsy store I created a few weeks ago.

It will sit there all by itself until I make more, or someone buys it.  Whichever comes first. 

Bad Blogger.

I had pictures to post back on Monday.  Guess what, I didn’t post them. 

Apparently I’ve decided school should come before my blog (I’m proud of myself for that.  lol).

First off I’ve got pictures of the handspun I finished last weekend! It’s the 50% Merino/ 50% Tencel that I bought from cavyshops a few months ago. The colors is Tropical Waters and last time I checked she still had one for sale.  I LOVED this stuff.  The large skein has about 400 yds and the smaller is about 58 yds.  I tried my hardest to cram all 4 oz onto one of my woolee winder bobbins but I was unsuccessful.  So I settled for 2 skeins.  The first skein would totally make a pair of socks or a scarf though, so the second skein could totally be used for corrections or if the yarn from the first skein isn’t quite enough for the project.

So last Wednesday I drove out to meet with some spinners from the Canton Spinner’s and Weavers guild.  Some of the spinners will meet the Wednesday after the guild meetings to hang out and spin.  It was a blast.  I took the orange lincoln/mohair that I bought at the Pittsburgh Knit and Crochet Festival back in February and started spinning it into a light worsted weight.  At first I really was not in love with it but after plying and skeining it is really starting to grow on me.  It’s a nice fuzzy kind of yarn.  I’m still not sure what I’m going to do with all of it since I’ve got a pound.  I guess I could always make that swap page on my blog that I’ve thought about doing.  Make a list of things I want to swap and things I’m interested in and see what people have to offer.  If not there’s always the little fair that the guild has a table at ever Christmas.  I’m not participating this year, but I could next year if I’ve got that much handspun hanging around.

Spinning, WITH PICTURES!

I took tons of pictures of the lovely colors while I was spinning over the past week. I LOVE LOVE LOVE these colors even though there is no pink or red in site. I have a weakness for those reds but I don’t mind cooler colors. Now that my BF fixed the fancy drive uploading them to the computer is so much easier than trying to locate the camera chord (that I’ve never used).

Now for a picture with some lighter blue.
I like this light blue. This is pretty much the last of the bobbin too. I reached the half way point in the spinning and started spinning the second half of the fiber on the second bobbin. I totally can’t wait to get this stuff done. And the good news? I barely have any homework this weekend! I’m pumped. Because I have very little homework today is going to be a day of pure spinning and knitting enjoyment.

I do have a picture of the second bobbin.  I love taking pictures and spinning progress pictures are so much more exciting than knitting ones, especially when the colors change.  Pretty purples with blues sticking out from underneith…mmm. I do like this merino tencel. The more I spin it the more I enjoy it.

The BF broke my computer… AGAIN.

GUESS WHAT!  I went to the store on Saturday to pick up a bigger surge protector so that I could plug more stuff into my walls and I ened up with a wireless keyboard and mouse as well.  I’m in love with it.  I type fast and I pound the keys pretty hard which annoys the crap out of my sister when she’s trying to sleep in the next room.  She’ll be happy.  This brand new keyboard also has all the letters!  My old one had been used so much that within 2 years a large number of the letters were completely gone.  I asked the BF to come over and “set up my new toys”.  I’m totally capable of plugging the keyboard thingy in but he likes new computer toys so I figured I’d let him do it.  While he was here he managed to break the computer.  AGAIN. 

Surprise, Surprise.  Well technically it isn’t TOO broken seeing as I’m still able to get online, write papers and do all that homework stuff that is oh so important.  The part no longer working is the front USB and my Memory Card drive thingy.  Technicall it’s not broken either, just unplugged.  He unplugged it from the computer, then forgot to plug it back in before he left.  If he would have really broken that fancy drive thing that I love he would be in BIG BIG trouble. 

I wanted to update today with pictures of the merino/tencel I’m spinning cause the colors are oh so nice, but the pictures are stuck on the camera since I can’t plug the Memory card into my computer.  So just pretend if you’d like.

School is kicking my butt.  I have SOME of my homework done but no matter how hard I work I can never get it ALL done.  I’m starting to think my math profs don’t expect it all to get done.  I think they just want us to spend 4 hours on each problem, then go ask them questions.  Either that or they just get bored during their office hours and want us to come visit.

What else is exciting?  SPINNING GUILD IS MEETING AGAIN!  First meeting (after the summer break) of the Canton Spinners and Weavers is this Wednesday at 6:30.  I’ll be there.  If you’re in the area and interested in coming you totally should.  They’re a really nice group.  Many of them don’t “get” the internet though.  There is a website but it’s not the fanciest and still has last years schedule on it.  GUILD WEBSITE.  If you have any questions about guild stuff feel free to send me an e-mail.  I probably can’t answer it but I can pretend really good!  lol.

Spinnings and a cat bed.

Remember that giant piece of felt I made? It makes a great cat bed.

As far as knitting and stuff goes I’ve got quite a bit done this week.  I would have updated on Wednesday like I said I would but homework and other junk caught up with me.  I actually took some time out of working on my afgahn to weave it some of those nasty ends!  I figured I should start now so I wouldn’t have 200 ends when I was sick of it at the end. 

Oh!  I’ve also started spinning up that merino/tencel blend that I bought from Cavyshops a month or so ago.  It’s shiny.  I like shiny.  Colors are gorgeous.  what you don’t see in the picture is the layer of blue underneith the green. 

Friday is SPINNING!

YAY SPINNING! I LOVE LOVE LOVE this spindle… and I LOVE LOVE LOVE these colors of roving. Cherry Tree Hill has some decent roving. It’s no soft luxury fiber, it’s a bit on the “sorta-course” side, but I think it’s going to make some great socks! Since I am doing it on the spindle it’s probably going to be a LONG time before the socks are done but that’s fine with me. I haven’t done too much on the spindle this summer because spindle spinning and the heat drives me batty. For some reason the wheel doesn’t bother me in the summer, probably because my wheel spinning is done at home, where the spindle tends to go “out” with me.