My son has been busy knitting on his flatbed knitting machine. He is having so much fun creating these hats from his fingering alpaca yarn!
I love fall (except that it means winter is coming) for all the colors of the trees. These are two of the trees on my son’s farm. Maples, so pretty. I took these a couple of weeks ago, the leaves have all fallen now. So after Christmas I will be going, “Is it Spring yet?”
The first picture is a skein of yarn I bought from my son’s farm store, it’s a medium brown alpaca from his male alpaca, Charlie, mixed with 20% red pulled sari silk. It is so pretty! It’s a fingering weight yarn, 200 yds. I might get another one to make sure I have enough for a hat or a pair of fingerless mitts as I like the cuff on the long side, I think they will be so pretty!
The next two pictures are a fair isle pattern my son has knit into hats using his flat bed knitting machine. They are knit flat, I’ll be sewing them up for him because, lol, that’s the part he doesn’t enjoy. He is really enjoying that machine!
Was at the farm today, my son and his spouse picked up so much yarn on Friday!! The first two pictures show all the beautiful yarn. The 2 pictures of roving (first picture is so you can see the roving clearly, the bottom picture is to show how much there is) is from a cria from last year named Laya, it is sooo soft. It was so soft the mill couldn’t spin it without it getting neps in it, so she processed it as roving and my son gave it to me, oh my all this soft fiber to spin!!! Her color is light enough that I can dye some of it if I want :).
It was Alpaca Farm Days today at my son’s and his spouse’s farm but I didn’t get to take any pictures, I was busy showing spinning for all the people who came to see the alpacas. The fiber I was spinning is some old stash cria that looks a lot like Laya’s fiber and just as soft :). It was a good day :).
He has been named….Apollo. He weighed 11 lbs 2 ozs at birth (on the small size) but weighs 12 lbs and 8 ozs now, he’s growing like a weed!! We won’t know his permanent color until he’s sheared next spring, but he is a cutie!
All my son’s yarn, for knitters and crocheters, and roving, for spinners and needle felters, from the past two years of shearing (yeah, there will be quite a bit!) is being picked up this Friday from the fiber mill and should be in his shop on Saturday for Alpaca days at his farm.
Ok, the first picture is a beautiful tonal blue yarn, colorway is I’m the Resistance. I had her do a special request to dye the tonal blue, as a full skein, that was in the American Woman color way I bought from her a couple of months ago. I wanted to use both in (I think I’ve settled on this but it might change so many things to knit :P) a cowl and fingerless mitts or hat to match for my grand daughter. The business is Awenydd Yarn & Fiber (click on catalog under the label at the top of the page to see all her beautiful pre-dyed color ways, you can also do a special order request like I did.) You can find her on YouTube where she does a Monday podcast reworking some of her older color ways while you watch her dye, a Wednesday podcast while you watch her dye from a random selection of colors of dyes from a random generator, it’s fun, and on Fridays she talks about her finished projects and works in progress etc. This request came out perfect! This is her Triple Goddess base, 100% super wash merino and a whopping 490 yards! It’s a light fingering weight. Would be perfect for a shawl, and to be honest I still haven’t ruled that out, lol. I have time to make my final choice :P. She also threw in a sample of her color way Reverie and 2 beautiful stitch markers and a progress keeper!
My son and his husband own an alpaca farm (I help out on Saturdays because they are open to the public on Saturdays.) I’m exhausted just thinking about how much work a farm takes as a business.) They took a well deserved week’s vacation a couple of weeks ago and went to FL to Disney World and Universal Studios to get away and rest, while Ev’s parents took care of the farm for them. They brought me back a Mandalorian Hoodie, a Harry Potter Gryffindor tee and 2 new pins (a Gryffindor and a Mandalorian) for my knitting project bag. You can probably tell I’m obsessed with Harry Potter and the Mandalorian :). So cool that they brought me something, it made me smile. The pin on the bottom is a zipper needle felted sheep I bought at a fiber festival a couple of years ago. In the next two pictures they are enjoying some of their Disney World adventures, they like Star Wars too.
The bottom right is just a cool picture, it’s called “a one in a million shot”.
Well I might have accidentally ordered a skein of yarn from an Indy (spelling?) dyer on YouTube that I follow, Awenydd Yarn and Fiber, I linked her shop, you can look for her on YouTube under that name. She does a Monday podcast reworking some of her older color ways while you watch her dye, a Wednesday podcast while you watch her dye from a random selection of colors of dyes from a random generator, it’s fun, and on Fridays she talks about her works in progress etc. This was one of her reworks of an older color way, she did last week, to jazz it up a bit. I fell in love with it, I had enough extra money and ordered it. She got it right out to me and she sent me that beautiful crystal in a heart cage progress keeper as a thank you, so pretty. I’m thinking about asking her to dye up a skein of just the blue color as a tonal next month. I thought it would make a nice shawl knitting 6 rows of the blue and 3 or of the American Woman rows throughout the shawl. What do you think? I think the blue would give it some balance and depth as a shawl, beginning and ending with the blue, and the brighter colors would make it pop a bit adding excitement and the blue in the brighter colors would pull the two together :). If I was a sock knitter I would just knit socks for July, but I’m not, so there’s that :P. She has knit samples with the skeins so you can see what the yarn works up as.
Hoping everyone is fine and not suffering with the heat. We are having thunderstorms today and tomorrow, and will be in the mid 90’s on Saturday, Sunday and next Monday, with sweltering humidity, which they said would make it feel like the low 100’s, :(. This is our late July and August weather, way too soon!!! Thank goodness for air conditioning!!!
I wish they would quit changing things on WordPress, this took an hour to get the pictures almost where I wanted them because creating the one choice I usually use, made them way to big and very long with no way to make them smaller. Ugh!
Anyway, my mind is un-fogged and I can think straight again and knitting on the blanket again, I’ll put a picture up of my progress in a few days or a week. I was very sick for 3 weeks in Jan, with some ugly respiratory virus’, RSV and influenza A, not at the same time (thank goodness!) but as I was almost over one I got sick with the other, very nasty critters.
The first picture is from some extra cold air that came down from Canada in Jan. Yes that is frost on the inside of the metal plate on my sliding glass door inside my apt. If I’d get some heavy thermal drapes that might not happen or if it did, I wouldn’t see it :P. I’m not a cold weather girl, but here I am anyway. sigh.
The second picture is the yarn I ordered before Christmas but didn’t get to start the Christmas gifts I wanted to do, partly because I was sick with a cold (this has been an ugly winter for getting sick for everyone I know!!) and wasn’t up to it. But now I can tell you what I got them for. I bought some patterns from Arne & Carlos and the Christmas tree decorations with the knitting Christmas ball color work ornaments was one of them. I will need to buy more of this yarn as I go. There are 24 ornaments in this pattern for $7, but just before Christmas they are 1/2 off. I’m really not into color work, but these aren’t very big and maybe I’ll decide I like it better than I did years ago. I haven’t started working on any yet, they will still be gifts, but I have a blanket and a couple of hats and a pair of fingerless mitts to finish first. All this sick stuff reset my brain and now that I feel human again, my knitting mojo is back. But this year I will have a little less time to knit because the new calling I now have in my church is much busier than the calling I had before. Especially while I figure out what I’m doing and get use to it!!! Having a little anxiety over the change and that is normal for me with change :P, but the knitting should help with that!
Well, I might have accidentally bought another 8 oz of spinning fiber, my picture didn’t really capture the sparkles. Let’s face it I have AD-OS (attention deficit – Oh Shiny!). I now have the same fiber, that I bought in yellow, now in cranberry. Thought it might make a nice batt with yellow, gradually blending the yellow and cranberry together toward the middle for an orange gradually blending back out to the, cranberry for a fade, well it works in my head anyway. Just a thought. As usual I got this from Camaj Fiber Arts.
I saw that KnitPicks is having their annual yarn sale (until 11/27 at 11:59pm so hurry!!!) and I got the Chroma worsted weight, 70% super wash wool, 30% nylon, on sale 60% off for $4 a skein so I bought 3. Then I decided I wanted to try to make this Brioche cowl, Purple Mountain Majesties from KnitPicks, I think it was a free pattern. I have never tried brioche before and it’s small (lets see if I’m biting off more than I can chew) so I bought 2 skeins in the colors of the cowl in the Chroma fingering weight, not 60% off, but it was 50% off so it was $6 per skein, still not bad. I got them all in and they are gorgeous, not merino soft but soft enough. But they are single ply, ugh, no where on the skein did it say it was single ply. Not my favorite to knit with, but I have them and they are pretty, I will see what I can do with the 3 that are not in a project yet, hats maybe, is 198 yards is enough for a non cabled hat? I’ll do some digging.
Haven’t gotten notice yet on the yarn being shipped for my special project, hope it comes in soon, I think it’s been the 2 weeks they said it took them to get it in. I need to go buy more color ink for my printer with my next paycheck so I can print out the color work Christmas stocking that Arnie and Carlos are doing as a free knit along. I’ve never really liked knitting color work and here I am jumping head long into deep water with a huge color work sock with an after thought heel (never done before, I can barely do the regular heel), and it’s charted (maybe I can read colors better than I can read symbols) oh my, life is so interesting! But if you are following along with Arne and Carlos on YouTube, it is really pretty.
Was warm today in the low 50’s, but tomorrow is 39F and it gets colder and colder from there. The next Monday will be around 22F, and after tonight most nights, will be in the 20’s (F) to lower teens. Winter is on its way!
I should have started these fingerless mitts earlier, but in my defense I was trying to discretely get her hand size before starting and finally decided I just needed to take my best guess and get it started, it’s for Christmas :P. These are the Na Ceithir Duil by Liz Corke on Ravelry, they are a paid for pattern. Sorry it wouldn’t let me make a link, hmmm. The last two years I’ve been working on a set with the dandelion pattern. 1st year was a turban style head band to cover the ears for walking in the fall and spring, 2nd year (last year) was a cowl, and this year are fingerless mitts. I won’t be doing the colors just white (I just needed the pattern so I didn’t have to do all the math for the pattern with how many stitches, math isn’t my thing), as the other items I knitted were all white, so it will match. I’m using a different weight and kind of yarn because this pattern is for a fingering weight yarn and so to keep her hands warmer I chose a Stroll wool blend from Knit Picks. I’m using 9″ ChiaoGoo red lace circular needles.
I have a special project planned for family Christmas gifts this year. Some kinds of knitting I don’t do because I’m not a fan, love looking at it but not knitting it, however these are smaller objects and so darn cute that I bought the pattern and bit the bullet and ordered some double pointed needles (my favorite needles are the Knitter’s Pride Karbonz because they are light weight carbon with metal tips) and I’m not a fan of the double pointed needles either (this pattern gets too small for the 9″ circulars and it’s too clumsy for my favorite Flexi Flips, I must be crazy!) I had to order the yarn (expensive) and I’ll post about the project when the yarn comes in, so until then it’s a secret :). I will be making these every year for a while as the pattern has 24 versions and everyone will get the same one in order each year, so I didn’t mind spending the money on the Karbonz (also expensive) because I didn’t have any double pointed needles in the right size (because I don’t like using them :P). Crossing my fingers this won’t be more of a chore than an enjoyment. You’ll see what I mean :P. The yarn probably won’t be in for a couple of weeks, the yarn shop had to order it.
Cooler weather is finally here, tho they are saying we will get back in to the 50’s this week into the beginning of next week, and maybe little snow next Wed and Thursday with lower 40’s and upper 30’s. Fall’s finally here in time for winter, sigh.
Time to update my knitting projects. In the top picture are two new for my Hats for Warmth Project I work on. I have 6 hats and the children will get 4, the other 2 will go in my bag to be sent to the shelter when I have 5 or 6 done. The hats I worked on during General Conference as I listened :). I use “I Love This Yarn” from Hobby Lobby, it’s a worsted weight yarn, and I use a size 5 (I knit a little loosely so I go down a size needle) 16″ circular needle (my favorite is the Knitters Pride Karbonz) in a two by two ribbing. For adults I like to make it 9 1/2 to 9 3/4 inches long so they can fold up the cuff (it’s too cold for a beanie here) and I don’t have to measure their heads for length that way :). ZeusHide on Etsy.
Next is the baby blanket I have been working on. This is a paid for pattern so I’ve linked to the Ravelry page so you can see more about it. I think I bought it from Webs patterns tho, I think that is where I first saw it. It is turning out to be a nice cosy easy knit. Turned out the lady I was knitting it for wasn’t pregnant (one reason I don’t ask because who wants to be embarrassed! LOL someone else asked). So I will continue to work on it at my leisure and enjoy the knit. Maybe it could be a lap blanket for someone at Christmas :). You can see the yarn I am using. It’s from Hobby Lobby, it’s soft, came in a large skein and was 30% off (which Hobby Lobby does every other week for its yarn). It will take the whole skein, but with the discount it was only a little over 8 dollars for the skien! It is a worsted weight 16oz skein, acrylic for easier washing. Without the discount it is $12.
The last small picture is 4 pairs of alpaca socks from my son’s store, a little critter snuck into his store and chewed them up. He had to go through all his merchandise to make sure everything else was ok and he put out traps to catch the little bugger. He’s not had the problem before so he’s looking to see where it came in at. He told me if I could fix them I could have them, so I said sure and I ordered what’s in the 4th picture, a nice darning set. The little flower looking thing is a needle threader, how cool!!! I was watching Knitting Expat from YouTube on her Finishing Fridays podcast and thought I could do that, no telling what they will look like but they will be wearable and since it’s on the toes or heels, no one will see it. They are different sizes so I think I can fix two of them one for my son and one for his spouse and the other two I can wear one and give the other one so someone else who wears an XL (it’s one of the colorful ones) tho with the toes involved, maybe it won’t be XL after I mend it lol. They are very thick and soft!
Gonna go make spaghetti for supper. 😉
LDSVenus-knits 