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!