Oops

Ya, so obviously I’ve been a bit of a blog slacker for the last, oh, 6 months *blush* sorry bout that.

We’ve gained a condo, lost a dog, remodeled, took up extra projects, and are finally coming back around on the other side.  Mostly.  My free time is usually spent like this…

I’m not sure why she likes to stack toys on me.

I swear this just happens when Little and I “play.”  Of corse she also likes to “help” when I’m attempting to knit as well.

Sly face!

So as you can probably tell, things are slow going.  I’m hoping to get the dye pots out of boxes in the next week.  In the mean time, here’s my first batches of hand spun that have come off my new wheel!

On our sunny new balcony!

Dyed, spun, and chain plied by me!!!

So much pretty ❤

New Blanks!

My shipment of new blanks showed up! It’s a bulky washable merino wool, and it’s made in the USA! I’m super excited!

The new company I’m ordering from is also supplying the wool/yarn for the 2014 USA Winter Olympic team!  How cool is that?!

There’s also a sampling of some merino wool which I will hopefully be adding to my Etsy shop as well.  I’m going to start dying it up ASAP (with dye made in the USA as well!), as I will probably make a few quick Christmas gifts with it.

I’m also finally on Instagram!  Follow LazerSheepYarns for lots of yarny goodness!

What’s on your last-minute holiday knitting list this year?

Deadline Swiftly Approaching!

Happy Halloween!

Hope you all had a fun and safe Halloween last night!  I’ve been neglecting the blog again to play with yarn (but who could blame me really?).

There’s a baby coming!  That means there’s a blanket in the works.  The shower for said baby is next weekend.  The parents-to-be don’t live super far from us, but it’s far enough that I want to make sure they have their blanket for when he arrives, so I’m knitting my little heart out every chance I get.  The only reason I have a minute to blog now is because I left my knitting at my parents’ house after all the Halloween festivities last night.  I am not a fast knitter, and I need to be working on this blanket every spare minute I have, so a retrieval mission is set for this afternoon.

I’m using the OpArt blanket pattern, which I’m LOVING so far.  I had a few others in mind, but when my husband saw OpArt he said it looked just like a tattoo that the daddy-to-be had, and that it was the one!  I think that’s as good a reason as any 🙂

I’ve also been playing with NEW yarn!  I want to expand my line of hand dyed yarns to include some different weights.  This is my heap of trial yarn to see what I like.  And bonus, all of it is made in the USA!!!

So much wooly goodness!

I’ve been in love with hand dyed single ply yarn lately, and in this heap there’s a very nice one in a lace weight.  There’s also a squishy soft superwash Marino bulky that I can’t wait to knit something up with!

What is your favorite type of yarn to knit with?

It was a Fiesta!

Wow, sorry I’ve been kind of MIA lately.  Turns out preparing for my first fiber event (not to mention entertaining a busy 1-year-old) is exhausting!

I’m happy to report that for my first event, it was great!  I met a lot of awesome people, and some of them even liked and bought my yarn! 😀  Big shout out to Candy Skien and Oink Pigments, who were not only lovely neighbors, but really awesome ladies with lots of tips for this newbie!

I had another bout of camnesia, and only snagged a few pictures all weekend… regrettably all of my own booth haha.

The booth, day one!

Those awesome stuffed Lazer Sheep are courtesy of my mom’s awesome sewing skills!

And here’s a little sneak peak of what will be coming to the Etsy shop, as soon as I get a chance to properly photograph them…

Buttons!!!

New colorways plus BUTTONS!!!  Each skein of yarn will now be coming with a button of their colorway namesake!  I’m super excited about them, and I’ve loved drawing them all up, so I hope you all enjoy them too 😀

Now, I’m having a little break, knitting on my Aloha Sheep hat (using my new knitting bag from Slipped Stitch Studios), and ordering more blank yarn so I can fill some custom orders.  Hope you all had a nice weekend.  What have you been working on?

Oh boy,

I’ve got a long morning ahead of me. This is 4 hanks worth of an experiment in gradient dying. While it did work, it was more involved than I’d planned, and now I have 872 yards to un tangle. Wish me luck!

So much being done,

And yet so little to show for it so far.

I haven’t mentioned it yet, but I’m going to be participating in the Vista Fiber Arts Fiesta Oct 12-13!  I’m super excited since this will be my first fiber oriented fair!  I’ve been dying up yarn as fast as I can manage, and then, a weird thing happened.  I had a rush on the stock I had in my Etsy store!  I’ve nearly sold out!  While this is great, it means MORE DYING!  All this dying has meant less knitting and a lot less blogging.  I’m currently waiting on another shipment of blank yarn, so it’s time to catch up on the other stuff!

I started my Summer Blooms Shawl not to long ago.  It’s plugging along at about 2 rows a day.  This isn’t so bad considering each row is 417 stitches.

I’m a little over half way through the lace portion and have started decreases.  I’m loving this pattern so bad!  It’s the first time I’ve worked with beads in my knitting, and it’s way easier that you would think.  The best part is that I get to use that sweet little antique crochet hook.  It belonged to my husband’s great-grandmother!  It’s the tiniest hook I’ve ever seen, and I can’t believe she could actually crochet with it!  I’ve seen some of the lace she made with them (I have several of her old hooks) and someday I’ll have to post pictures of them.

There’s also been some Christmas knitting going on (102 days left!).  I started a nice chevron blanket.

 

Still not sure exactly who will receive it come the holiday season, but at least I’m making progress on some gifts.  I’ve stash busted some Caron Simply Soft for it, but knitting to much is somehow rubbing my fingers a little raw.  Anyone else have that problem with acrylic?  It’s never bothered me before.

I’ve also started a scarf for my aunt.

 

I’m not sure if I like it though.  I had wanted to do this pattern out of something with mohair in it, but I didn’t have any in white, and my aunt keeps saying how hard it is to find a white scarf.  This is some more acrylic from the stash.  It has a sort of pearled strand running through it, and the yarn itself is kind of bumpy.  Any of you have a better pattern you’d suggest?

It looks like my blanks have arrived!  So back to the kitchen with me.  I’ll have more fun shop updates soon 😉

 

Little by little

Big things are happening!  Just very slowly.

I’ve got so many balls (of yarn!) in the air right now, that I’m having a hard time keeping track of it all.

Another project from my trip has been completed, the Tardis infinity scarf!  Of corse in my excitement I gave it to my friend without taking any finished pictures of it  (Pattern to come, I swear!)

I started knitting my Summer Blooms Shawl from Interweave Knits, using my alpaca paint from the trip!  I had to frog it twice and have only a newly cast on edge to show for all my work.  (Cast on edge is 417 stitches!!!)

The Christmas list has been started, because THIS will be the year all my knitted gifts are finished…  just like last year.

There are some super fun things coming to the shop!  New dyeing is all planned out, I just need to find time to work on it.

I (might) be doing a small fiber festival locally in October!  (Currently I’m first on the wait list and debating over how much prep I should actually do.)

On top of all of that, we are having to move the beginning of October.  The plan was to buy a place, but due to some personal things we will be free loading it at my sister’s for a bit as we have to leave our current apartment (they discovered how many pets we have, oops.)

A long to do list might help me break down how to accomplish all these things in a timely manner.  I can’t think of any other way.  How do you all stay organized?

Since I don’t have any wooly pictures, here’s one from our trip taken at Cape Flattery, the furthest North West point in the continental US!

The LOOT!

Ooooo, ahhhhh

This trip made my stash grow significantly.  I managed to get my family to allow me to stop at SEVEN different yarn/fiber shops over the corse of our three-week track!  😀  I was so excited!  I only have 2 local yarn shops, and I don’t make it out to them as often as I’d like (probably good for the pocket-book though).

The first shop was The Naked Sheep in Portland, OR where I picked up some much sought after Alpaca Lace Paint for a shawl, and some pretty Ultra Prima Quatro Cotton for a sweater for Little.

Wrong time of day for a pic

Super cute little shop, and conveniently for me, located just 2 blocks from a bottle shop that kept my brother and dad busy while my mom and I squished some yarn.  😉

Next up, I continued to feed my lace addiction with a little hank of Baby Silkpaca at Yellow House Yarns in Puyallup, WA.  Other locations in Washington held wonderful locally dyed wool, which I happily snatched up.  Diva Yarn in Port Townsend,
WA offered up that lovely little bat of blue green alpaca/mohair, locally hand dyed by Eaglemount Fiber (sadly no web site).

In Port Angelus, WA I turned a corner to see this…

Pretty yarn flowers!

Then this…

Yarn covered statue!

Then this…

Random yarn shop! Score!

This was the only yarn shop that found me before I tried to look it up on my phone!  haha

Cabled Fiber Studio was full of beautiful yarns and fibers, lovely people, and a very sweet rescued greyhound (I’m sad to say I can’t recall her name)!  I picked up a lovely braid of 80% merino 20% silk that was dyed locally by Rain City Fiber Arts.  It was so soft and pretty, that, as you can see, I didn’t even wait to get home before I started spinning it up.  I don’t know what I’m going to make with it, but whatever it will be will definitely be soft and snuggly!

Rain City Fiber Arts, Eaglemount Fiber, and The Village Spinning and Weaving Shop

The North Coast Knittery in Eureka, CA was full of luxury yarn!  I’ve never seen so many pretty things!  They had a kit to knit a teddy bear, that came with 100% angora, and 100% cashmere yarns!  Sadly most of the prettyness was out of my price range, so I picked up a sweet little ball of Kidsilk Haze.

Monterey Bay was where I found my last custom yarn.  My family went to park the car, and ended up right in front of The Twisted Stitch (which I was going to try to bribe them to go to later any how haha)!  Dawn, the owner, was just as nice as she could be, and told me that while sadly nothing was made locally (You hear that people in Monterey!  Get on it!) that HPKY hand dyed colors just for her shop.  Each color was unique, and soooo pretty.  I decided to try to bust out of my ongoing “blue” theme and picked up that lovely hank of orange/purple sock yarn (1 hank is enough for a whole pair of socks!).

L-R top row first: Ultra Prima Quatro, HPKY sock, Kidsilk Haze, Alpaca Lace Paint, Baby Silkpaca,

 

The last stop I got to make was in Solvang, CA at The Village Spinning and Weaving Shop.  Some of you may recall that is where my hand spun hat started out, as just a little ball of wool.

Ahh, full circle.

In honor of that, I picked up some undyed BFL top, to turn into something beautiful.

It was a long and wonderful trip, and we did get to see a lot more than yarn shops (there were breweries too!), but I’ll save some of those pictures for another time.  Has anyone else gone on any adventures this summer?

 

 

Up Past My Bedtime

But it was worth it!  I finally finished my hand spun hat last night!

It’s had itself a bath…

 

And spent today in a sunny spot to dry out, safe out of the reach of the cats.

 

With any luck, even with the icky humidity lately, I will have a hat to wear tomorrow 😀  (Never mind the fact that it’s been at least in the 90’s here lately, and this hat is 100% wool.)

What projects of yours are so good they keep you up at night?

Plying With the Spindle

Yesterday was a no make-up, get stuff done around the house kind of day, and today looks to be more of the same.  I dove into the spare closet where all my crafty stuff had been tossed, just to get it out of the way, during the move.  Spent all day burying Little’s room under a pile of stuff, then finding it again so she could go to bed.  To reward myself for a hard days work, I broke out my spinning once again to try to finish plying all I had so far.

On that note, I thought it would be a good idea to give you all the long-delayed plying tutorial!  When I was just trying to take up spinning I was lucky enough to get to sit in on a local spinning guild’s class.  I spun my first bit of yarn there!  Before I left, the instructor outlined the plying method I’m about to show you, and, not to brag or anything, but it’s a lot easier than having to wind up a bunch of center pull balls like most of the You Tube videos suggest.  So, on to it!  (But if you haven’t read my original drop spindle tutorial, check it out here.)

Supplies, easy!

Grab yourself an old shoe box you don’t mind poking holes into, and a good, sturdy pair of needles you don’t mind poking through the box.

Poke! Poke!

Stick your needles through the shoebox as shown.  This is what I call the “poor man’s lazy Kate.”  Make sure you leave enough space on all sides of the needles for your “spool” to turn smoothly.  And by “spool” I mean those TP tubes with your singles wrapped on them (or is that just me?).

“Spools”

Double check!

Make sure that your singles are coming off the spools on the same side.

OPPOSITE of the way it was spun!

Slip the end of both singles through your starter string (see previous spinning post for a how to) and start spinning the OPPOSITE direction that you spun your singles in.  In my spinning tutorial I spun my singles by rolling the spindle UP my leg, so, when I’m plying, I roll the spindle DOWN my leg.  Easy peasy!

Mmmmmm

When my spindle was full, I unwound it onto a home-made niddy-noddy (there are lots of tutorials on how to make one out of PVC pipe) that measures in yards.  That is about 80 yards of my finished, two ply yarn!  I can’t wait to finish plying the 1/2 pound I have spun up.  I’m hoping to have enough for a nice slouchy hat 😀

Even if you don’t end up with enough yarn for a large project, make something out of it!  Even if it’s just a thin headband.  You’ll love it all the more because it was made totally by you!  Have fun!

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Shop news!  I have the original colorways up and running again, and, new lower shipping cost!  Woot!!