TdF: day.. everything between day 2 and the present….

This is horrible.. I have been spinning mind you, but I’m so behind I don’t think I’ll ever be able to make it… :’( I’m actually pretty sad about it, but on the other hand, the weathers been so great the past few weeks I’m not ashamed to say I spent a lot of my time outside the house (away from my fleece and yarn). Tho it may not be a lot I have actually spent some time spinning and especially thinking about ways to improve my spinning. The last few posts about spinning I’ve mentioned things about my ratio and wanting to speed things up as it was getting rather frustrating. So first I maimed one of the three bobbins I have to see what it would do. The result was fine but rather irregular so I started thinking some more and found a nice little solution:

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You’ll need a few of these first…

Foto0267and these…

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and then you’ll get something that might resemble this:

Foto0263so what do you think? Isn’t it pretty? :P so the holes in the wood part are a little bit bigger than the thingy that goes in it so there’s room for rotation but it can’t move the way it shouldn’t move.  Anyways, this little baby has a ratio of 1:10 so I can say I’m pretty darn pleased :) The little bit of spun stuff is a bit of the wensleydale I have from my birthdaypresent. I wasn’t planning to spin it all, just to try and see how it would go. It works like a charm (tho it does look kinda cheap).

Besides thinking I’ve also been spinning some alpaca and tho I’m not as far as I’d hoped I’d be but its progress none the less :)

alpaca 200gr

There’s another reason for why the spinning was so slow, at first I was carding the alpaca to create neat little rolags for spinning, but after a while I stopped. I spin with the longdraw method and the rolags weren’t very helpfull because they got all clumpy.. :S The uncarded fleece however spins up niceley so I might actually make some progress here :)

kitties & fur

So here’s some shamless advertising.. (above is a picture of my kitty Noodles in her favorite box) I’m not connected with these people in ANY way nor am I making money off of this but I just HAVE to tell you this: this is the best invention ev-ahhh! It’s for all of you who have kitties, bunnies or doggies and it’s called: the FURminator.. yea lols

So you might now that I’ve been saving up kittyfur to spin me a nice pair of mittens for some winter, but that winter might actually be this winter instead of in a distant future… my kitties are shedding like you wouldn’t believe and there’s kittyfur everywhere in this house.. but then today I discovered the furminator and in one day I doubled my stash of kittyfur…..

kitties & fur

there’s a bigger one for doggies I believe but this one caught a lot of kittyfur for me in a few strokes… so here’s the stash upgrade:

kitties & fur

this is what I harvested today…. and I just got it 3 hours ago…. all of this fur could’ve landed on my carpet….. :| this stuff is everywhere man….

kitties & fur

this is my total stash of kittyfur… I have short haired cats (as you can see above) and it takes a while to harvest a nice load of mitten worty fur.. I’m just so scared it’ll felt before I’m ready to spin this stuff… :’(

Anyways, you might’ve noticed but the artblog is back in business and there’s a link to it at the top of the page called ‘sketches’. On this blog you’ll find my drawings and sketches and maybe later some more artstuff :) If you’re too lazy to move your cursor to the link above you can click HERE to get there.

So last but not least: I’ve also been knitting because it was too hot to spin but not too hot to knit.. am I making sense?

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The pattern is creature comforts cardi and it’s knit in the handspun Dandelion I had finished a few posts back. This version was knit in a bigger size so I frogged it and reknit it. When I was plying this yarn I had underspun the whole thing, causing it to untwist and to break at some points, I was a bit traumatized by this and so I rather overspun the n-ply on the BFL.. I think this is the reason that the yarn is a little bit scratchy. I’ve heard BFL is supposed to be very soft but it’s actually not that soft.. I’m still hoping it’ll get a bit softer after it’s been washed but I’m not keeping my breath. I don’t mind that much anyway because it’ll be my first BIG project using my handspun and I’m proud no matter what :)

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summer activities

This is my third post this month.. what happened? :P I’m usually such an active blogger but I must say I’ve had to wait for this summer for a long time and I’m enjoying every bit of sun I can get. Thankfully someone sent a major heat-wave our way and our cold and windy little country has become a tropical paradise :)

But there’s more to tell than just how great the weather has been. There’s some major stuff going on :) First of all I’ve washed all my fleece and it’s dried and ready for some heavy carding action. Unfortunately as it’s still very hot I’m in no mood to start working on warm alpaca fleece right now, so the pretty clean fleeces are just going to have to wait.

The other thing on my mind right now, like most other people in the world, is the World Cup. I love soccer :) I was raised with a soccer fanatic father who used to play himself, so soccer was a big thing when I grew up. It still makes me happy to think that every four years the whole world is united for a few weeks because of their love for soccer (well… winning the world cup hehe).

Anyway, there’s not much time knitting while watching soccer, and no knitting means no blogging :) I’ve also already talked about my spinning wheel and my 5,5:1 ratio… this, unfortunately for me, means that I can’t spin while watching the game either.. so I just sit there and watch the game as my hands do nothing but relax :) (I do get the feeling my hands are enjoying the well-deserved rest too!).

Obviously it doesn’t mean I don’t knit anmymore at all! I’ve been working on some things, but the progress is very slow. Beside all of the above reasons for me not to knit there’s one other… I’ve already mentioned it here, but I guess I can say something more about it :) I just handled my first workshop and I’m really excited to do some more :) This blog is all about me stepping out of my comfort zone and trying to organize my life, and right now I’m doing exacty that.

On my internships I found out I value my personal time much more than I used to think I did. I thought I wouldn’t mind working full days, and I still don’t think I’d mind, but I will have to enjoy every moment of it. I don’t want to end up waking up feeling like working is a waste of my day, and starting to wish my days away so it can be weekend. I don’t want to waste my time and I don’t want to wish my life away like that. So now that I’m still a student and don’t have anything to lose this will be my first priority. I need to think about these things now before I end up being stuck in routine…. :P

Sorry people the rant ends here…. :P From this point on it’s about showing you the progress of the past few weeks :)

sewing

Guess what.. I got a birthday present from my parents :) I noticed I tend not to knit in the summer (because it’s hot) and sewing skirts and dresses seems like the way to go. But tho I tried my best, the edgings never came out really professional.. and now I know why :) Lockmachines are the shit! :D

sewing

So obviously I bought the latest burda style and tried to make this pretty dress… So far it turned out to be a little more tricky than I anticipated, but I think I can handle it :)

sewing

Since I just got the machine and don’t fully understand it yet I tried it on some fabric I had lying around. My grandmother gave me this blue fabric with the large pink flowers on it. I really like it tho it’s a bit much :)

lace capelet wip

Before this ridiculous heat-wave it was rather rainy and cold, so I felt like knitting again.. unfortunately for me I did the cast-on a bit too tight so I need to restart this one, but I really like the pattern. It’s the lace capelet in malarbigo lace oceanos.

Dandelion n-ply

When I reached half of the 300 grams I got really bored and decided to n-ply the spun singles on the bobbin. So far I’m not even halfway I think but I’m happy with the way the colors are blending. I’m still not sure what it’ll become but I’m sure it’ll be fine :)

Dandelion n-ply

The singles weren’t all that even at some points but the plying evened it out so I’m pretty happy with the way this is working out. I must say that my ratio is really really annoying when it comes to plying. Spinning the singles is becoming a pain but the plying just downright sucks…. The end of the singles on the bobbin (where I started out plying) didn’t have enough twist at certain points because my hands would start to work faster than my feet.. even tho my feet were treadling pretty darn fast they still couldn’t keep it up. So I ended with a nice cramp in my foot and undertwisted singles……..

Tomorrow I’ll see if I can do something about it :P