More spinning

I picked up a good bit of fiber at the Mass Sheep & Wool fair two weekends ago. The majority came from the Spunky Eclectic booth, where I sort of fell down on my credit card, and got four braids of beautifully dyed top. They had a merino/superwash merino/silk blend that was just beautiful to the touch, and a merino/yak that caught my eye. I picked up two of each, in reds and in greens.

But wait — that’s only three! Well, yes. I got impatient and spun up one braid before I even got home:

It was 4 oz. of the merino/superwash merino/silk and it practically spun itself: it was absolutely gorgeous, and such a joy to work with. I just spun on my “default” setting for yarn, which was easy and fun, and got a yarn that’s somewhere between a worsted and a DK.

I didn’t just fall over in the one booth, though. I also picked up some sock batts (10% nylon, hooray — otherwise I go through socks like they’re made of tissue paper) and some beautiful autumn-colored silk at A Touch of Twist. I have no idea what I’m going to do with the silk, but it just called my name so nicely, and it will be a lot of fun to spin up.

I’m already looking forward to Rhinebeck, in October. Hopefully by then I’ll have spun most of this, so I can justify picking up a little more.

Block of the Month Progress

I’m participating in Jeni (of In Color Order)’s Half-Square Triangle Block of the Month quilt along. So far I’ve finished the blocks up through April, and I can’t decide if the pinwheels or the flying geese are my favorites.

I am very proud of the way the pinwheels all line up in their centers, though.

I’m not stopping with April, of course. And I thought I had finished May’s block, before I realized that I had flipped two of the light-blue half-triangle squares. I took the one side section off, flipped it 180 degrees, and thought “There! Now the light blue triangles are facing the right direction!” And then I looked at it, and realized that now the corner blocks faced the wrong way.

I’m not very pleased by it right now, but once I’ve forgotten about the amount of ripping and re-sewing I had to do, I’ll probably be a lot happier with it. I’ll probably fix it over the weekend, and also get June’s block cut out, because it looks like one I’m going to like quite a bit.

I’ve been half-seriously considering doing two blocks for each month, to put together a larger quilt top when this is all over. Of course, that simply highlights the fact that I haven’t the faintest idea what on earth this quilt will be when I finish it: a gift for someone, presumably, but for who? I have no idea.

It’s funny: I appear to be very much a process quilter, while I’m sometimes a very product-oriented knitter or spinner. Who knew?

Mixtape quilt basted!

It feels like a long time since I’ve posted about this, but the mixtape quilt I’m making for a friend’s son is all basted and ready to quilt!

I love the way the blocks are arranged: if you look closely, every set of four (2×2) has one from each color group. I’m always impressed when people write patterns that lay blocks out in regular but not immediately obvious ways, so this pattern has been a lot of fun.

The back is fairly simple: just a strip of white separating two of the small prints used on the front.

One thing I’m really pleased about is the fact that the stripe on the back lines up almost perfectly with one of the strips of sashing on the front of the quilt. This will really only ever be visible when the quilt is folded partway, but it makes me happy.

For right now, it’s basted with pins at the corners of the blocks, but I’m not sure that’s enough. Anyone with more quilting experience: is that enough, or should I pin the centers of the blocks, too? They’re eight inch blocks. I’m torn, because I don’t want to have to quilt around even more pins, but I also don’t want things to shift about too much. Advice would be wonderful.

Finally, I’ve done up two samples of ways I might quilt this sucker. They’re done in black thread against a light background to make the stitches more obvious — it also reveals that I probably need to adjust the tension on my machine a little bit, since you can see the white thread from the other side poking through a bit here and there.

I’m not really sure how to quilt it — loops or zig-zags are probably easiest, as far as free-motion quilting is concerned. I’ll have to talk to the recipient and see what she likes best, and go from there.

As for other projects, I’ve been chugging along on the blocks of the month, but I just made my first large piecing mistake, so I’ll leave that (and its fixing) to next week.

MA Sheep & Wool

Last weekend I visited a friend in Holyoke, MA, and on Sunday we went to the Massachusetts Sheep & Woolcraft Fair. There, we saw a whole lot of sheep (as expected).

Some were very curious:

Some had horns, though I didn’t get pictures of the ones that had four horns:

And some were clearly destined to be sheared for spinning wool, and had silly jackets:

As for me, I liked the bunnies:

We trawled the vendors barns as well, and I picked up a bit of spinning fiber, but I don’t have any pictures of it just yet. Back to quilting on Friday. (Schedule change: updates twice a week, on M/W/F.)

Handspun instead of quilting.

The quilt I’m working on has been very stubborn today, and I’m about to rip out a piece of sashing for the second time in the hopes that this time the squares will line up on either side. Needless to say, I’m not going to post about that today in any more detail: maybe Friday.

Meanwhile, I’m on break from classes for the next several days, so yesterday I sat down, turned on the TV, found a movie I wanted to watch, and spun on my Ashford Traditional. It was really relaxing, and it was nice to sit down and just spin at my ‘default’ yarn without putting too much thought into it.

4 ounces of fiber came out to about 200 yards of 3-ply. The fiber was a Ultraviolet BFL roving from Fiber Optic Yarns.

I picked up several rovings from Fiber Optic Yarns when I was at Greencastle a little over a year ago. And while I really want to knit with them, the colors are just so gorgeous that I’d been having a hard time making myself spin them up. Thankfully, the My Precious Quilt-Along has reminded me that, really, working with the pretty materials can be a good thing!

I’m really happy with this yarn: the color doesn’t come through clearly in the picture, because it’s been raining and awful all day, and the light is completely flat. Go look at the picture I linked to: there you can see how the purple dips into and out of an almost black hue.

Knitting WiPs, or, sock roundup.

Apologies for the silence here! I was wrapping up the semester and then at the medieval congress in Kalamazoo, and that all added up to not very much getting accomplished, craft-wise.

Today’s post is a knitting round-up. I tend to have a few projects going on at a time (this is probably evident in how I’m going about starting quilts right and left) and I have a couple too many knitting projects going on right now. Hopefully this will incentivise my finishing one or two of them.

There are socks for my mother, which are this close to being done:

They’re actually a lot of fun: the yarn is Malabrigo sock, which I’d never knit with before – it’s a joy. The pattern is 2k-2p-inside-out, and I really like the way it forms little ribbed chevrons down the foot.

Then there are the blue socks for me, which are the only socks I’ve knit for myself in at least a year (what can I say, I have a family that appreciates hand-knit socks!). I”ve just started the second one, and I have about three inches of it — it’s slow going, but it’s good subway knitting.

They’re in Claudia Hand-Paints, which I love knitting with, but always knit from toe-up, because its skeins are on the small side, and my feet? Well, they’re on the large side. Better safe than sorry, no matter how easy it is to call different-colored toes a “design feature.”

There’s also a red sweater that I started two Novembers ago as an attempt at National Sweater Knitting Month — I got almost all of it done, realized my gauge on the bottom half of it was wrong, ripped it all out, and haven’t picked it up again for ages because it’s so disappointing to have to re-do so much work. It doesn’t get to have a picture, because I don’t love it enough right now. Also because the red yarn photographs really badly in artificial light.

I have two projects that are so close to being done that, apparently, they have encountered Zeno’s Paradox and will now never be finished. I started to teach myself how to knit entrelac last summer, got almost to the point where I’d have to bind off the scarf, and completely lost interest. I also knit a baby sweater for my little cousin (the same one who got the ladybug quilt) and didn’t finish it in time for her to still be small enough to wear it. Hopefully I’ll finish at least one of them over the weekend, and be able to post them next week. I figure someone I know has to have another baby eventually, so the sweater can just lay in wait for that. The scarf, though, is probably going to be re-purposed as a pillow, since it’s too wide and short to make a reasonable scarf.

Finally, there’s the “I have the brainpower of a really small rock right now” project:

It’s the Log Cabin Baby Blanket from Mason-Dixon Knits, done in Cascade Eco Wool and Cascade Eco Plus (which is the same thing, only dyed all kinds of colors). It’s great for watching television or sitting in the car, because it’s all garter stitch, and there’s no thinking other than stopping once in a while to find out you still have way more ridges to knit before you’re done with that block. I love that the blocks are asymmetrical and the pattern doesn’t expand in a traditional log cabin fashion: I can’t wait to have this finished and be able to curl up under it, though at the rate I’m knitting, I’ll finish it sometime in June.

I think that’s all the projects I have going at the moment. Wednesday, back to quilting!

Blocks of the Month and a Mother’s Day gift

I’ve not yet sewn together the previous two Blocks of the Month, but I have cut and laid out another one.

I think April is my favorite so far:

And just in time for Mother’s Day, I’ve finished up two potholders. Not a terribly interesting gift, but at least they’re useful, and I know she likes the fabrics included.

The pattern is Half-Square Triangle Pot Holders from In Color Order. It was very clear and easy to follow, though I added loops, which might look a little funny. And of course I was brilliant and pinned everything together and THEN cut it all square, instead of quilting it first. It ended up not being a huge deal, but I’m planning on not doing that again.

On other fronts, I’ve completed two of my three courses for this semester, but the third is going to be a lot of work, so I may be just as quiet next week as I was this one — apologies in advance.

Mixtape progress and Block of the Month question

First of all, here’s the rather pathetic progress I’ve made on the Mixtape quilt since the last time I posted about it:

I’m looking forward to finishing it up, but I think it’s going to have to wait until the end of the semester: something about the potential finished-ness of it once I sew in the long sashing strips is giving me pause.

In the mean time, however, I’ve changed up the fabrics I’m using for the Block of the Month quilt:

The new one in the dark blues is the cities print from 1001 Peeps; the yellow dotty ones are Ta Dot by Michael Miller, which I’m fond of.

Here the light blue has benefited from the addition of some Ta Dots as well.

And because just cutting them was putting far too much temptation in my way, here are two blocks that I’m almost ready to sew together:


This is the March block, and I think I’m pretty okay with how it looks.


This is the January block. And for this one, I could use some advice: which orange? Or should I pick something else entirely from the fabrics I showed above? I’d love a second (or third, or so on!) opinion, because I’m really not so sure about this one as it sits now.