Finished...Friday, 8/31/2012

I've been very "out of crafting" mode the last week or two. I think I really forced myself to the wall by pushing so hard to finish my blanket for the Ravellenic Games. However, tomorrow I'm leaving on a trip to Texas for a week, and I'm bringing cross stitch with me, so by next Wednesday I should have some progress to show. ;)

However, today something else is finished. I hope I can be forgiven for, unusually, posting a non-craft related thing in this blog. I do try to keep it on topic, but today is a big day for me - a big ending.

Today is my last day of work.

In 2003, I started working for my mother's small business doing part time work - primarily book keeping and data entry. By 2005, this was my primary source of income. By 2007, this was my full time and only job. But I've grown increasingly unhappy the last few years, and starting in June of 2011, I really hit the wall. I reached the point that every day was an effort. Every work activity I had to do was, "crap, I have to do that. :(" And finally, I accepted: it didn't matter if it was a "good" job, or any of the other justifications I had given myself. I shouldn't have to do a job that makes me miserable. I decided in February of this year that I would quit, and that today would be my last day. I've been counting down ever since. I informed my mother around February, and we as a company informed our clients in late July, and I've spent this month doing wrap up and organizing and all manner of other "omg we're almost done" kind of stuff.
And today is my last day.

This is the end of a big chapter of my life - a job I've had for 10 years - and I only have a few somewhat thought through ideas of what is coming next. All I know is...it's gonna be something new, and I'm totally freaked out about it. ;)

Until next week! Fiber Arts Friday; Finished Object Friday

Finished Object Friday, 7/27/2012

Well, it's been a bit! I've been working very early the last couple Fridays, with evening plans to boot, so I've missed some Fridays. Meanwhile, this Wednesday...I didn't HAVE any WIP - since I hadn't yet settled on my Ravellenic Games project - and therefore very little to say for myself. But now I'm finally around on Friday - if rather busy - and can quickly take a few minutes to show off the vast amount of spinning that I got done during Tour de Fleece!! :)

Angora!
I tried my hand at spinning angora for the first time!

1 ounce, Navajo plied, around 40 yards. :)

Silk!
While I was experimenting with fibers, I also took a stab at the silk cap that I had bought!

Also 1 ounce, also Navajo plied, but it's sooooo thin, I ended up with 110 yards!

Everything else I tackled was sheep-y. I did some "confetti" - boring old wool with bits of multi-colored yarn mixed in...

And I spun some lovely superfine merino that I had bought, the braid felt like a dream, and I tried my hand at fractal plying - no idea if it worked...

Of course, I did a bunch more of the spinning of the fiber that I prepped and dyed myself...

Finished the first pound!

All in all, I did about 2 pounds worth of spinning during Tour de Fleece. But man, I need a break! So it's time to drive myself insane crocheting for the Ravellenic Games. ;) Here's the whole TdF stash!!


You know you want to...check out Fiber Arts Friday and Finished Object Friday.

Finished Object Friday, 7/6/2012

This week has been all about Tour de Fleece, and spinning my own dyed fiber! It's been pretty fun. I've rarely spun this much this quickly (though not never! ;) ).

Right before TdF, I finished the second skein of yarn for my Nerd Wars dissertation. I posted a couple pics last week, I think, but now I've set it and dried it and all that jazz. :)


127 yards, exactly 4 ounces, roughly DK/Worsted weight.

Then, in May I tried Wilton's dyes for the first time. I posted a bunch of WIP pics of this on Wednesday, and now it's done! Turns out it's only 5.4 ounces - I had thought it was more. I wasn't too happy with the singles, or even how it looked while I was plying it, but once I got it off the niddy noddy and it was all dried, I'm actually thrilled with it. Funny how that goes...



400 yards, 5.4 ounces, fingering weight. Really very happy with it. I want to figure out what to make with it! :)

Check out what everyone else has done this past week at Wisdom Begins in Wonder and Tami's Amis.

Finished Fiber Arts Objects Friday, 6/29/2012

This week, I've been all kinds of all about spinning!

First, I finished all that rainbow and black spinning I've been doing!


Here's the last one, that I finished earlier this week:




Now I'm just working on picking out which skirt pattern I want to make. I don't actually have QUITE enough yarn (I ended up with about 550 yards of roughly worsted weight three ply) but I've got a couple other handspuns that I'm thinking about using as well (more next Wednesday).

Then, I did my first skein of spinning of that yarn I dyed last week!

136 yards, Navajo-ply, 4.7 ounces, added loads of Angelina...only downside is that it's REALLY hard to get the colors to show true. So, it's actually more blue than this:


But, it's more purple/green than this:


More next week, cause I've got loads more of this stuff to spin! Also, check back on Sunday: I'll be doing an entire post on just how I did this dyeing and got these colors!

Check out Fiber Arts Friday and Finished Object Friday!

Finished Object Friday, 6/22/2012

So, I mentioned on Wednesday that even though I've been absentee, I have managed to make a FEW things in the last month or so. This is primarily been my spinning (and spinning and spinning) and a brief foray in to knitting - the majority of my crafting is actually still in progress, since so much of my time is going to prepping the fleece I talked about on Wednesday!

Dish Cloths
I've been trying to go green in whatever ways I can. For example, I bought two sort-of washcloths that I've been using and washing instead of paper towels for tasks like scrubbing the bathroom. This has been a raging success - the same two cloths have done the trick for several years now. Now, my dish sponges weren't quite as disposable as paper towels, but even so, the damn things fall apart within a few months, so I figured...I should give it a try! Make a couple dish cloths out of cotton and see if they last longer than sponges would have. And, because of Nerd Wars and my inestimable love for Supernatural, I made them aligned for the show.

The top one isn't too legible, so I'm gonna leave it that way, and the bottom one says "Jerk." (they are the two main characters nicknames for each other). Considering I've never done a chart like this before, I'm not at all unhappy with how they turned out. I didn't block them or weave in the ends; I figured they'd just get out of whack again when I used them. "Jerk" has been in service all week, and so far I'm pretty satisfied! In particular, they hold soap better than I thought they would. I'm being careful to extra-soak stuff, since of course I've lost all scouring ability. :)

Rainbow spinning
At Maryland Sheep and Wool I bought 16 ounces of black-base with rainbow colors in it to spin. I LOVE rainbows. My determination was to use this, once spun, to make myself a skirt (I'm aiming for around 600 yards). So far, I've done 12 ounces (but the last I only finished today, so no pictures yet). I also taught myself to Navajo ply in May, and have used this project to practice on. All in all I'm pretty happy with how it's going. Here are the two skeins that are done so far:

Oddly, even though the blend is supposedly the same, the top one (which is the one I did first) ended up way more orange, and the bottom one way more blue. So far the third one looks to be somewhere in between, which is good - if they look TOO different I'll end up with a pretty wonky looking skirt. Interesting, the close ups of the two skeins look so similar I can hardly tell them apart! Yet at a distance, they are clearly pretty different.

Either way, I'm more-or-less in love with how it's turning out, and looking forward to finishing the fourth skein so that I can make my skirt, probably in July. So far, I've got 180 yards in one skein and 120 yards in the other (yeah, I wasn't quite as consistent with thickness as I'd like) but both are hovering around DK (just one is kinda heavy DK and the other is pretty much right on...). I think the third is closer to DK, too, though I haven't checked yet.

So...that's me! Check out what everyone else is up to this Fabulous Friday! Finished Object Friday and Fiber Arts Friday are filled with awesome blogs!

Fiber Arts Friday, 5/18/2012 (Adventures in Dyeing!)

So, at Maryland Sheep and Wool, I bought this fleece!



Her name is Irmalinda. My goal, over the summer, is to prepare either half or all of these fleece (I haven't decided quite yet - I need to get a scale and check a few things) by taking it from raw Irmalinda with tags and all to pretty dyed and spun yarn. In preparation for that, I split the fleece up into bags of from 4 to 6 ounces of fiber, and then I took one of those that had a fairly nice section of the fleece and did the whole process with just that section. First, I soaked it for 24 hours with a bunch of dish soap to get the gunk out.




That's a LOT of dirt! I used the water for my plants. :) Next step after that was to let it dry, and then I used hand combs to comb it out.



It takes about 10 minutes to comb about a half ounce of fiber. I'm left with this:

Two little mini balls, and then up top, a bunch of little ends and kinky bits and pieces that aren't adequate. This was my first mini-balls - this one I spun just to see how it would go.



I also taught myself to Navajo ply with this, which was easier than I thought, except I don't QUITE have the hang of it and keep overspinning it. Anyway. ;) I prepared the rest of the fiber, and then with five of the mini-balls that I had, I decided to make my first attempt at dyeing the yarn! Towards that end, I improvised a scale because it's 1 ounce of Kool Aid to 1 ounce of fiber, but my scale isn't working (I'm trying new batteries and if that doesn't work, I'll buy a new one).



Since I knew the weight of each Kool Aid packet, I used a simple balance scale to measure out Kool Aid equal to the weight of the fiber! (though that's uncombed fiber, not one of my mini-balls). I then prepared it all in a pot! To keep the fiber from getting all tangled with itself, I put a jar in the middle, and decided to use that jar for dyeing, too!



In the jar, I put one packet of Tropical Punch; in the main pot, I put 3 lemonades, 1 orange, and 1 cherry. However, as it turns out, the lemonade is WAY too light, so the yellow virtually doesn't show at all. The orange and the cherry took pretty well, though, and the Tropical Punch went excellently.




This is the "top" and the "bottom" of the four balls I put in the main pot. In total, I ended up with...




Because of the way I layered everything, the mini-balls went from lightest (top) to darkest (bottom); and then here was my pure red/orange tropical punch ball. I decided to spin them all together and go with the color gradient! Then, I tried Navajo plying again. It didn't go particularly better than the first time, but practice makes perfect, right?


66 yards of three ply right around lace weight. Oops, too thin!

Want to try dyeing? Here's what I've figured out:
1. Use more dye than you think you need. Seriously. The rule of thumb is 1 ounce of Kool Aid to 1 ounce of fiber, but I think a little more might be better (if you want the colors saturated, anyway).
2. For Kool Aid, you don't need to add vinegar, and as far as I can tell the amount of WATER in the pot doesn't matter, it's the amount of fiber compared to the amount of dye.
3. The candy thermometer was invaluable. I'd never have been able to figure out the right temp with out it. For wool, the goal is right around 170 degrees.
4. It took about 45 minutes of soaking at the temperature to soak up all the Kool Aid dye.
5. The color didn't run at all, and I was lazy and didn't rinse it. This seems to be okay, except that my yarn REALLY smells like Kool Aid.

To top things off, yesterday I tried using Wilton's Gel Dyes instead (it just takes so damn much Kool Aid!). I'm still waiting for it to dry, so I'm not sure yet if I accidentally felted the fiber I was using (this time using fiber I bought not fiber I prepared). I'll write up more about this some other time - maybe next week.

Want to read more amazing? You should go to Wisdom Begins in Wonder and Tami's Amis and other Creations!

Finished Object Friday, 3/16/2012

Well, I'd hoped to have two finished objects for today - I'm sooo close to finishing the back stitching on that fall fairy I've been working on. I made a lot of progress on it Monday but haven't had the chance to work on it since then. Next week, that's the goal. :) Until then, though, I did finish some spinning right before I had to leave my wheel behind when I headed out on a road trip!


Five hundred yards of lovely blue sparkly DK. This is that cloud of fiber I bought a couple weeks ago. It took FOREVER to spin, and I have no idea, but I adore the finished project. I just wish all the sparkle showed in photographs.


Pretty much every where that looks white is actually silver.

I'm in the market for ideas of what to make with this! Cause I love it and want to make things. Note that it's not actually that soft. So...thoughts? :) Check out every one's fabulous work this Friday over on Finished Object Friday and Fiber Arts Friday.

Finished Object Friday, 3/9/2012

This is a reconstruction of this original post, necessitated by some aggravation.

In 2009, my apartment got bed bugs. I had just been getting in to cross stitch again as a major relaxation tool, and when the bed bugs hit, the only time in my ENTIRE experience I actually SAW a bug was on my current WIP at the time. Needless to say, that sucked and was VERY upsetting. So I put that project in quarantine. However, I still wanted to cross stitch, and so while I was road tripping while they exterminated my apartment, I bought a new project - this project - and started it. I was still working on it when I got home, and discovered...more bed bugs. So it too went in to quarantine. In 2010, I pulled it out and worked on it a little, but I didn't ultimately end up finishing it until, well, until now! Still, I have some progress pics from along the way that I thought are worth sharing.

But first, the fun stuff! My finished Dragonfly and Water Lily cross stitch! After three years!!






When I started working on it again in 2010, here's about where it was:

I worked on it a bit while on a vacation, but then it ended up put aside again until January. When I started working on it then, I got it to this point pretty quickly:


From there, I worked fast. By mid-February, I was well along the way!


Finally, about a week ago, here was it's status:


Cross stitch does take forever, but the results are worth it...at least I think so. And as to all my mistakes...we won't talk about those. ;)

Fiber Arts Friday, 3/2/2011

No finished objects this week.

But...last night, I had a strange dream. I was on a road trip (not unlike one I'm planning for next month, leaving in just over a week, in fact...) and I discovered a warehouse dedicated to spinning and spinners! I was VERY excited, cause I've been in the mood to spin, and I thought, "hey, if I can go in there, surely I can buy some fiber, cause I won't have to spend on shipping..." so I went in. It was HUGE and crowded and it had displays of spinning wheels and looms and carders and all manner of other things. But all I wanted was a fun-colored braid of roving...and I couldn't find any! It was very frustrating! Finally down in the clearance section I found something I thought might suit...so I resolved to buy it, even though I thought there must be something wrong with it, because it was in clearance, and just...something seemed wrong about it. I even thought, "this will tie in well to Supernatural for Nerd Wars, too!"

If I'm at the point that I'm dreaming of buying fiber? It's clearly time to buy fiber. So I went to the Yarn Co. and bought some today! I'll be spinning it...oh, starting tonight.


First, I bought this fun green. 4 oz. total. I like that it's in two ounce balls, will make it easy to divide when I got two ply it. :)


I bought this lovely wool/silk mix so that I could play with dying it. I even stopped at the grocery store, but they didn't have any of the packets of kool-aid, so I'll have to try again.


Because of one of the NW challenges, I really wanted a cloud of fiber, and I was really glad to find they had some lovely stuff, all made by Loop Art Fibers. The price wasn't bad for her stuff, either (she runs pricey, but I knew that already, having been to her studio last year, and seen her at MSW also...). All in all, I'm thrilled with what I ended up with, though, it's perfect for my needs, and I LOVE how much it looks like a cloud.


Yeah...I'm gonna start spinning this tonight. ;)

See what everyone else is up to over on Tami's Ami and Other Creations blog and Wisdom Begins in Wonder.

Finished Object Friday, 2/24/2012

Wow, I've finished something TWO WEEKS IN A ROW! It's like...Christmas or something. :) Or not. I don't know. But there's spinning, that I do know. ;)

Evergreen

Goal was pretty simple. Spin a single, as thin as I could, using "luxury alpaca blend" (85% baby alpaca and 15% bombyx silk) that I bought from Little Barn at Maryland Sheep and Wool last year. I figured a silk blend would be a good trial for thinness, since it'll take being spun VERY thin. Anyway, I had 4 ounces of fiber, I spun them all. I wanted to leave it as single primarily so that I could meet a Nerd Wars challenge. Silly reason, I know, but hey, why not? Anyway, I finished last night. I had so much yardage that it took over an hour just to transfer it on to a niddy-noddy. Which was annoying. But at long last, I was finished!



I had a lot of trouble getting the colors to photograph true, but it's actually a dark green heather with some lighter fibers mixed in, including some light blue and some yellow. It's quite pretty, though VERY dark. It's also VERY thin.



When I wrapped it around something, I was getting something like 40 to 50 WPI. So...thin lace weight, bordering in to cobweb. Despite that, it held together pretty well - it pulled apart like five times when I was transfering it to the niddy-noddy; I was worried it would pull apart MUCH worse than that. And I have almost exactly 750 yards of the stuff.

Now I just have to figure out what on earth to do with it...

Want to see more fabulous work by other crafters? Check out Wisdom Begins in Wonder and Tami's Ami and Other Creations.

Finished Object Friday - 2/17/2012

Not loads to say for myself today, and I've got to run out the door, but I do, for the first time in AGES, have a finished object to show for the last week, and dang it, I'm going to show the darn thing!! :)



I did some spinning! The red is merino; the white is loose-carded tussah silk. I drew them together, so each single of the ply includes both types of fibers. It's pretty much the first time I've ever intentionally tried to make a bulky yarn, because of the way that the tussah formed pretty, fibery clumps. :)



I'm pretty happy with it. This is pretty much exactly how I wanted it to turn out! :)

Other people have way more to show for their Friday's than I do! Take a peak at Wisdom Begins in Wonder - Fiber Arts Friday - and Tami's Amis and Other Creations - Finished Object Friday!