Crochet has taken over!

 In my typical method of doing things, I am now obsessed with crocheting.  It is just nuts as I have not done serious crocheting in years and now I cannot seem to put the hooks down😀

I picked up another skein of clothesline that was a bit smaller in diameter, 3/16" (4.8mm) for another basket.  I crocheted it using a 3 color rotation I learned knitting what are called helix hats.  It was as fun as the first basket!  The smaller cord has better coverage, I still used the Village Yarn Craft Cotton that I used on the first basket.  I like the yarn, it has a great feel and the colors are wonderful.

Since that was so much fun, I started another - surprise, surprise!  This one has a larger base, I went up to an 11 stitch increase.  I started this while waiting for the yarn to come for a blanket that I decided to do.

Well I met up with my friend, who had ordered the kit from Wool Warehouse in the UK.  The yarn came surprisingly fast and they have very reasonable shipping considering it is coming across the pond.  So needless to say, this basket has been set aside because I had to play with my new yarn and a new pattern.  I also will run out of cord partway up this basket and I need to figure out a good join.

Here is so far, it will be a pretty thing!  I also now know I have to work the handles longer.  I brought the helix basket to my moms, and found that the handles are just too tight and short.

Now onto a new blanket!  I am going to be making a mosaic patterned blanket from Tinna Thórudóttir.  It is her Queen CAL that she did a couple of years ago.  Wool Warehouse has the kits, and I bought the Ruby color way.

The colors are so rich and pretty.  It is a lot of fun having these bags of yarn sit on my couch just tempting me to crochet faster so I can get to the next color.  This will have 9 colors plus cream as the pattern yarn.

Tinna has the pattern set up to do in a number of different ways and sizes.  At first, I was going to crochet it vertically so that the color bands went side to side, from dark to light to dark again.  I did start it that way and as the pattern grew, I decided that the motifs will not look as nice side to side, so I ripped out everything that I did and started it over working from the bottom up.  The colors will not be as I would have liked, but the pattern itself will look so much nicer.

This is first time that I have tried mosaic crocheting.  It is making a really dense, thick, and squishy fabric.  I really like it!  I had originally planned this blanket for going on the foot of my bed, but the colors are going to look wonderful in my living room, so its going to be my new cuddle blanket and my old one will go into my bedroom.  Fun times!

The Weeks Recap

 I managed to finish up a few things this week.  Some were more challenging than I needed them to be, but that is the way things go.

I have been working on spinning up 4 braids of fiber for a sweater.  I finally finished spinning the dyed braids and plied one of the bobbins.  I am chain-plying all of the braids, they are coming out as a fingering weight yarn.  So I wound off the plied bobbin onto my skein winder and gave the skein a bath.  One of the choke ties came off when I pulled the yarn from the water!  What a mess!  I have never had that happen before.  Fortunately one of the ties held, so I was able to hang the skein to dry.  This morning I put it on the umbrella swift and wound it into a nice cake.  It was not the big tangled mess that I was worried about it being, so that was good!  

I just need to finish plying the other braid/bobbin of this color way and all of the yarn with be spun.

I also finished mom's mittens.  I just love the Knit Picks Galileo yarn that I used for the lining.  It is just a beautiful yarn to knit and the color was just gorgeous.  Mom liked them too😀

The other day I was wandering around looking at patterns that a particular designer had available on Ravalry.  I found a really great one for making crocheted rope baskets.  I ordered some cotton craft yarn and picked up a package of cotton braided clothesline and made a basket!

It was really fun to do.  The designer is Tinna Thórudóttir and she has a great You-Tube tutorial on how to make a basket and it works and works well!

I will be making more since this one is now holding the skeins of craft cotton that I used to make the basket!  I need to get another 100' of cotton braided clothesline to make another of this size.  I used about 63' for the one above, and I like the size.  I used a 10qt utility bucket as the form.

The basket proved to me that my old Boye aluminum crochet hooks are just not fun to use!  I ordered the 10 hook set of Clover Amour hooks and they came today.  I knew that they did not come in a nice case or roll, so I made one.  

First I wove a quick band on the Good Wood mini inkle loom out of Lunatic Fringe 10/2 perle cotton.  The colors are so fun to use.  I then used 2 coordinated fat quarters for the case itself.  I knew the handles would be down in the slot on the case, so I used the embroidery monogrammer attachment on the Singer 401a to mark each slot with the hook size.  Overall it came out pretty nice.  I put the flap on the top to keep the hooks from falling out if the case is picked up upside down, plus it will protect the hook end.

A couple of the letter cams on the attachment just would not work correctly, so I did have to just kind of free hand a couple along with the number "7" with a satin stitch.  It will be really nice not to have keep pulling hooks to get to the size I need.

So that was a pretty good week - finished some stuff and found a new tunnel in Fiberland's rabbit-hole with crocheted baskets.  Fun times!

A bit of a knitting frenzy

 So last week or so, I finally finished a pair of lined wool mittens for myself that I started back in 2019.  What pushed me to finish was taking a walk while wearing gloves and my fingers got cold.  And I thought to myself, finish those darn mittens, they will be great for walking.  I always planned for them to be my snowshoe mittens, but fortunately for my procrastination on finishing them, we have not had a lot of snow the last few years.

So here are the finished mittens:  

The pattern is called Northman Mittens by David Schulz.  The pattern is available on Ravelry which is where I originally saw it when one of the weavers on Warped Weavers posted her finished mittens.  When they were done, I took them for a walk with my mom.  She eyed them and I asked if she would like a pair and she said yes.  When I came home from the walk I went through one of the tubs of wool and found a couple of skeins of knitting wool that will work well.  

Mom is not crazy about wool next to her skin, so I ordered some Rowan Cotton Glacé for the lining.  I picked up all the stitches and started knitting with the cotton and decided I just did not like the way was knitting or feeling.  I then went and ordered a couple of skeins of Galileo Merino/viscose from KnitPicks.  I think that the blend should be okay, plus its not like she will be wearing them for hours on end.

These are mom's mittens, the green is a needle cozy holding the DPN's that have the cuff stitches picked up on.  

Since I was waiting for the KnitPicks yarn to come and I was in knitting mode, I pulled out the leftover yarn from the outside of both pairs of mittens and knit a scrappy hat.  That went really fast, so I knit another, and another from some other bits of yarn.  They all had to be washed and blocked, and since I was doing that, I finished weaving in the ends of a vest and washed and blocked that as well.

So here is the results off a weeks long frenzy with knitting needles:  the vest finished, 3 hats knit, and the outside of mom's mittens.  The vest and hats are for WoolAid, I just need to package it all up and send it in.  There is also another vest on needles, so once that is finished I will send it all off.

I wove some holiday towels again this year, and also made some holiday temari.  This morning I finished stitching the 3rd temari, so it is nice to have that all finished up.  Temari are so fun to do so I am glad that I have another blank all ready for stitching.  I just have to decide on the pattern and colors.

There was a thread about sizing a warp out on Warped Weavers on Ravelry that really had me thinking.  For quite a while, I had been messing around with some fine hemp yarn and Romney singles that I had spun.  I finally decided on a draft and the number of ends and so forth, and wound the warp.  I sized it using Sta-Flo liquid laundry starch and dressed the loom.

When I started to weave, I was having broken ends all of the place.  It seemed that with every pass of the shuttle an end broke.  I was not going to deal with something like that, so I just cut it all off and tossed and chalked it up to a bad experience.  Now after reading the sizing thread, I realized I over starched the warp making it very stiff and brittle.  No wonder I was having the issues that I did.  This was a wonderful thing to figure out because I really wanted to use this yarn in this project.  I am planning on refiguring the weaving draft and wind a new warp and give it another shot.  Time will tell!

Back to it.....again

 Well I am back.  I cannot believe how long its been since I posted here.  Let's see if I can actually stick with it for a while.  Looking back I have not posted since November of 2019.  A lot has happened since then!

I am still weaving, lately not as much as I once did, but the looms are still in action.  I retired from work as of August 1, 2020 and I have mostly just been playing in Fiberland ever since.  It is a real pleasure to be able to do what I want, when I want to but the downside is that I have little to no structure in my life.

I have learned a few more art forms that I find fun and fascinating.  In January of this year, I started to learn to play ukulele.  I have never played a musical instrument before, so it has been an interesting and sometimes very frustrating, and sometimes very satisfying thing to do.  Unfortunately I found with ukulele, they are a lot like looms and vintage sewing machine, way too easy to accumulate them.  I probably have a few more than I really should, but it is just so darn fun and they all sound different.  

When my oldest brother learned that I was messing about with stringed instruments he gave me a McNally Strumstick and a mountain dulcimer kit to build.  I did actually build the mountain dulcimer.  It was an interesting and different experience and while it was okay to do, I do not need to do it again.  It really does not have a very sweet sound and it is hard to keep in tune.....which led me to ordering a beautiful Ron Gibson cherry mountain dulcimer.  I also wove a very cool strap for it on the Gilmore Mini Wave using a pattern from one of Laverne Waddington's wonderful backstrap pattern books.

It is a lovely, sweet sounding instrument that I really need to play more often than I have been.  There is an online class offered in January that I am kicking around the idea of taking.

A couple of years ago, I learned to stitch temari.  Temari is a form of Japanese embroidery on a sphere.  One actually makes the ball, which is a multiple step process and stitches a design on it.  I have been using DMC Perle 5 for the design threads, so that meant adding a new yarn stash....sigh.....  I now have 4 floss boxes full of various colors of DMC.  I tried using the 5/2 perle cotton that is in my weaving stash, but the twist is different and does not lay the same way that the DMC does.

Here are a few I wove last December for the holidays along with the holiday run of towels.  It's been fun weaving towels to go with temari and vice versa.

I also learned to shuttle tat.  I have known how to crochet lace, but never learned to tat.  I just couldn't resist those cute little shuttles!  And believe it or not, my favorite shuttles are some of the most reasonable, the Clover tatting shuttles that can be picked up at Joanne's in a 2-pack.  This also led to another type of yarn stash - because of course the twist on both the DMC perle and the weaving cotton is not right for tying a zillion little knots.  Crochet cotton is quite different from weaving cotton.

And as crazy as this sounds, playing with tatting cotton had me dyeing tatting cotton!  I always said I would not go down the yarn/fiber dyeing rabbit hole, and there I was this summer with bottles of dye and little skeins of cotton.  Here is a bracelet and anklet that I tatted from yarn that I dyed.  I have lost my mind!

I am also still knitting and spinning.  I actually finished a pair of wool mittens for myself that I started in January of 2019.  I also knit for Wool Aid, mostly hats, vests, and mittens.  One of the weavers I know from Ravelry weaves and knits for Wool Aid and I found it to be a good organization to become involved with.  I like to knit, but I do not really need a lot of knitted goods, so this is just a win/win for me.

It is amazing all of the different fiber pursuits that I am involved with.  I just bop from one to another to something else.  I guess that is why I feel I have no structure but I do not seem to be in a big hurry to do anything about it.  It satisfies a creative need in me that I never realized I had or that it was so strong.  Making things, either with fiber, music, or even in the kitchen just is so pleasurable.  Now to see if I can make blogging a part of my creative outlets.