The LA County Yarn Crawl

When I first got my Electric Eel Wheel (see previous post), I was having a problem with my yarn breaking as quickly as I could get it started. Fortunately, I sought help from Alexandra of Alexandra's Crafts. She was doing a spinning demonstration at Needlepoints West up in LA during the Yarn Crawl a few weekends ago. She had a similar electric spinning wheel, although it was from a different manufacturer. She was very friendly and helpful when I explained the trouble I was having and she told me to loosen my tension and try a longer stapled fiber. I did both and have been happily spinning ever since!

Alexandra also makes gorgeous yarn and fiber. I just couldn't resist picking some up! Her luxurious merino, bamboo, and silk blend is on my spinning wheel right now and I'm very happy with how it's turning out.

Here is the fiber, along with a sparkly rainbow gradient that I tried to resist and ended up going back for. It's just too pretty!

What kind of craft supplies do you find hard to resist?

-Assunta

Happy 2017!

I can't believe how long it's been since I've posted. It's a whole new year already! I have been busy traveling and crafting for the holidays. Also, our home sale finally closed so my husband and I will now be able to put our creative energy toward fixing up the house! Here is a barage of images to show what I have been up to for the past month. I hope to resume my regularly blogging schedule starting next week. Apologies for the image quality, many of them were taken during our holiday road trip and all without the aid of my light box.

Before we left on our trip I knitted this dress for my niece for Christmas. She is about 1 1/2 years old now!

These crocheted stacking animals are also for my niece. The leaves on the palm tree took me forever! I was working on that tree for a big part of our journey north.

While visiting my husband's aunts and uncles in Sacramento we came across a shop called Rumplestiltskin. Since I love everything to do with fairytales and yarn, I just had to go inside and pick up some gorgeous wool for spinning!

While in Portland I made this baby mermaid costume as a custom order for a friend who is expecting in February!

I received a Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer amigurumi kit for Christmas.  Here's Rudolph in a hotel in Redding, on the way back to SoCal. 

Now I am working with my Sheepicorn yarn from Electric Sheep.  This is how much I had knitted at our last stop in Santa Cruz.

I hope your year is off to a wonderful and crafty start!

-Assunta

Handspun Yarn for My Mom!

My mom is one of my very best friends, and she's also the one who taught me to sew and crochet! Ever since I started learning to spin, I have had an idea in my head to make beautiful yarn for her. Of course, it took me a few test skeins to get to gift-worthy yarn, but I think I finally did it. My mom's birthday was yesterday, November 22nd, and this is what I gave her:

I even made my own custom label, but I must give credit to Blarney Yarn for her super-soft wool blend and gorgeous hand-painted autumn colors.

You may recognize this wool from my past post on the Vista Fiber Fiesta!

I spun and plied the yarn on my trusty Ashford spindle.

Stretching the yarn out on my noddy-noddy showed the colors to their best advantage and got it ready to soak. 

Yarn soup! Soaking the yarn helped clean it and set it.

Last, I hung it to dry on a hook that was left in front of what will soon be my craft room. (I can't wait to repaint or replace that door, though!)

What do you think? I want to try dyeing my own yarn next!

-Assunta

PS- I had a great time at Hearts & Hands on Saturday. I brought a friend and we each made a few spool knit hats for refugees. Making the hats was fun, but the best part was being around people from different backgrounds all working together and using their creativity to help others! It was wonderful to see!

Tour de Fleece Finish Line

The Tour de Fleece officially ended on Sunday,  and I finished spinning all my blue Alpaca wool just in time! I still have to ply and wash it, so I wouldn't call it yarn quite yet, but I'm still happy with the progress I made during the Tour.

I've got a couple of other craft projects going as well. Hopefully I wil have one of them done to show you next week. Happy crafting!

-Assunta

OC Fair Results!

This past Sunday, the husband and I decided to brave the opening-weekend crowds at the Orange County Fair. We shared a funnel cake, said "hi" to all the animals, and of course stopped by the fiber arts building to see how my entries did. What I didn't do was take any pictures, so I will make sure to do that next time we go.

I was pleased to see that my crocheted rose got 2nd Place and my crocheted cactuse got 3rd! The dress I sewed got Honorable Mention, which still isn't bad, but my knit lace shawl didn't place. I was surprised because I thought it was the best thing I entered, but there were a lot of knit shawls so the competition was pretty tough.

So that I don't sign off without showing you something pretty this week, here is my latest Tour de Fleece progress:

The Tour officially concludes on the 24th, but spinning updates will continue until this yarn is done. There's still a lot of fiber left in the bag!

-Assunta

Tour de Fleece Day 10 and a Cactus Pattern

Yesterday was Day 10 of Tour de Fleece and my yarn has come quite a long way since you saw it last week! In fact, I now have 126 yards of 2-ply purple goodness soaking and almost ready to knit!

This is after spinning all of the wool into a single strand of yarn.

And this is after plying it all.

Here it is stretched out on the niddy-noddy my friend Jill made for me out of PVC. That's right, I have a noddy-noddy now!

Now it's soaking to help set the color and the twist. I can't wait to see the finished product!

Also, for anyone interested in crocheting their own potted cactus, my pattern is now available on Etsy and Ravelry for $5.

Just keep spinning!

-Assunta

Tour de Fleece

Did you know even crafters have sporting events? I just found out myself. This year, a couple of my friends told me about the Tour de Fleece. It's a spinning event that takes place during the Tour de France, only instead of spinning on a bicycle, you work toward yarn spinning goals.

I have already made some progress spinning the beautiful wool that I recieved for Christmas. My goal is to have it all spun, plied, washed, and ready to knit by July 24th, when the Tour ends. The challenge for me will be plying, because so far the only two skeins I have spun have been single-ply. It will be fun to learn a new spinning skill as part of this experience.

Besides the joy of making my own yarn, part of the fun is joining a team. This is mostly because it's nice to have people with whom to share your work while you also admire theirs and you all support each other. In addition to my regular craft group, which fits all these categories, I have joined Team Tale Spinners on Ravelry. They have a fairy tale and fable theme, which is right up my alley!

The tour started on July 2nd, and I actually missed the first day. Here is my progress from the next two:

Ready to spin! Counterclockwise we have: the yarn I have spun from this batt so far, the wool I have left to spin, and my Ashford spindle, all ready to go!

Day 2: I spun for about 1 hour. It doesn't look like I did that much, but I'm hoping that's because I'm getting better at keeping my yarn from getting too bulky.

Day 3: 2 hours of spinning on top of  the one from the previous day. It's looking a little more impressive.

Stay tuned to see my progress, I'll need all your support when I get to plying!

-Assunta

Vogue Knitting Live

Last weekend I drove up to Pasadena with a friend to attend Vogue Knitting Live! If you don't know what that is, it's a big fiber arts show with lots of wonderful things. One of our other friends was working there as a rep for Little Dandelion. They make big yarn and huge needles!

Here are some of the things I got:

 White Lies Designs was having 4 for the price of 3 sale on patterns. I had trouble narrowing my choices down to only 4, but these are the ones I chose.

I couldn't resist this alpaca wool by A Simpler Time Alpacas & Mill. I love how soft alpaca is, and it is my favorite shade of blue!

The book pictured below is Crocheted Abode A La Mode by Twinkie Chan. It was a prize for winning an amigurumi scavenger hunt. When my friend and I learned that there were little crocheted doughnuts hiding in some of the booths, we wasted no time hunting down two of them and winning the books. We even met the author and got her to sign them!

The pattern I'm most excited about from this book is the giant doughnut ottoman. I actually ran into it on Pinterest the other day and was seriously considering buying the book before I happened to win it. What good luck!

The last thing I got was this Bubblegum Blues yarn from Oink Pigments. I love how the colors look just like bubblegum, and I plan to use it to make the White Lies pattern at the bottom right of the image above. I think it looks like something a mermaid would wear!

Here it is, all wound up and ready to go.

The hardest thing about Monday was not being able to knit and spin all day because I had to go back to work. I hope all of you did something fun last weekend!

-Assunta

Making Yarn: Tools I Didn't Know I would Need

There are lots of things I used to take for granted when buying ready-made yarn from a store. For example, I never asked how one would figure out the yardage of yarn on a skein, or the weight of the yarn. As long as the yarn came with a label that had this information printed on it, I felt content that I had all the information I needed. Until I started shopping outside of Joann's and Michael's I didn't even know that not all yarn comes in a compact, easy-to use ball or center-pull skein, and that many shops sell it in twisted skeins that need to be wound into a ball!

Since I began spinning my own yarn, I have learned a lot not only about how yarn is made, but also how it is prepared and measured. 

For example, this scale (which you saw a few months ago) is perfect for estimating shipping on tiny items, and for measuring how many grams or ounces of yarn you have!

If you want to transfer your freshly spun yarn from your spindle to a skein, it is helpful to have a niddy-noddy, which is a funny name for a tool that looks like this and makes a nice even skein when you wind your yarn around it. I have yet to aquire a niddy-noddy, so I wrap my skein around the back of a chair, which works okay.

One of my friends gave me an electric yarn ball winder for turning that skein into a ball, once it's all washed and finished. I ordered a swift (that blue thing on the left) from Joann's to assist with the ball-winding process.

When it's done, this ball of yarn looks pretty professional for only my second batch of homespun.

When I bought my yarn in Guatemala, I learned a couple other yarn measuring tricks. For the most part I felt pretty successful at communicating in Spanish, but when I asked the lady who sold me the yarn how much was on the skein, all I was able to understand was that they don't measure in meters. Maybe they use yards, but I assumed they didn't so I didn't learn the word for that. When I returned to los Estados Unidos, lamenting the fact that I had no idea how much yarn was on the skein, one of my friends taught me a neat trick:

1) First, stretch out your skein of yarn, similarly to how it appears in the chair picture above. 

2) Measure the length of the skein from one side to the other.

3) Count the number of strands 

4) Do a little math: (The length of the skein) x (The number of strands) x (2, because the skein was folded in half when you measured it) = The total lenth of yarn on the skein! 

Thanks to this trick, I now know that one of my skeins from Guatemala has about 827 yards on it! 

My friend also taught me a useful trick for measuring the weight of the yarn. I tend to estimate weight by sight a lot but if you don't feel comfortable doing that, you can measure wraps per inch. This means wrapping your yarn around a ruler or other measuring device and counting how many wraps it takes to cover 1 inch. Next, find a chart to tell you how many wraps per inch equals which weight. It frustrates me that every chart seems a little different, but I guess that's why we always check our guage, right?

This yarn took 18 wraps to equal 1 inch. According to this chart on Craftsy that's a thin sportweight, just barely above fingering weight. I'm using it with a pattern that calls for fingering weight and it's working well.

I hope you find some of these tricks and tools useful, I know I have!

-Assunta

Guatemala's Tradition of Textiles

My recent visit for Guatemala was wonderful, for many reasons. The food was simple but delicious, the people friendly and kind (though some of them can be very aggressive sales people!) and the bathrooms cleaner than I would often expect in the US. But for me the best part was that everywhere you look you can buy handwoven works of art, and even learn a little about how they are made!

One day, we visited a weaving cooperative, where twenty women make woven works of art by hand. Here are all the things they need to make yarn: 

All of the white and brown fluffy stuff is cotton. The little black spots in the bowl near the top left are cotton seeds that are picked out before the fiber is spun into yarn. Next, they spread out the cotton as shown above and beat it with one of the forked sticks to soften it up. Then it is ready for spinning!

This lady is spinning the cotton into thread on a spindle. I got a chance to try and it seemed much more difficult than my drop spindle, because it kept wanting to spin right out of the bowl! The women who work in the cooperative are pros at it, though.

Once there is enough yarn for a skein, it's time to dye! Just about any color can be made from plants, tree bark or even bugs! It's pretty amazing. In order to help the color stick, the yarn is first dipped into a bowl of clear stuff (which I think was banana sap, but I don't remember for sure) before being soaked in the dye. The darker you want the color to be, the longer it needs to soak. Then it is hung up to dry!

I was inspired so I bought two skeins of yarn at the cooperative. Two skeins was only 30 Quetzales, which is less than $4! It's a very thin lace weight but there is a lot on a skein, perfect for a lace shawl.

On another day we visited a pueblo, or village, called San Antonio Aguas Calientes. They are considered the best weavers in the country because they are the only pueblo whose weaving is double-sided! Backstrap looms, like the one this lady is using, are very common. There are also big floor looms, but those are mosly used for weaving very large pieces.

Everywhere we went in Guatemala we saw women wearing traditional hand-woven garments like what you see in these pictures. I loved all the bright colors! Unfortunately, it is much less common to see a man in traditional clothing.

Where do you like to go when you travel? Where have you met people who inspire your creativity? 

-Assunta

My First Homespun Yarn

Remember the little drop spindle I showed you back in early October? I've actually been using it to make yarn! I started practicing with some blue, green, and purple wool I bought in Eugene, Oregon, a long time ago.

This is the yarn store, it's called Soft Horizons Fiber. Isn't it cute? There aren't many places I would rather be than a pretty house full of yarn! I miss it!

This is the little drop spindle I bought on Etsy, with my very first little bit of homespun yarn on it:

I watched a couple of good tutorials on Youtube to help me learn how to spin, and some of my crafting friends were able to lend me their advice as well. One of my friends even gave me an extra spindle that she had, which is much bigger and heavier, and therefore can hold more yarn and make thinner strands! 

This is what my finished yarn looked like after cleaning and "fulling," a felting process that helps the fibers of the yarn bind together. You are supposed to hit it against a table until the thickness is even and all of the twists are gone, then hang it to dry. Maybe I need more direction, but it seemed like no matter how many times I hit the yarn against the table it just got more twisted! Eventually I tied it around this chair tightly enough to get the twists out so that it would dry straight. That's probably cheating, I know.

Here is what my finished ball of yarn looks like. You can see the green and blue, with just a tiny bit of purple peaking through at the center. Now I just have to decide what to make with it!

It will have to be a small project and something that will show off the color changes nicely and not get too messed up by the (unintentional) changes in thickness. It's hard to get the thickness even when you are learning to spin. I asked a lady at the Vista Fiber Festival if there was a trick to it and she said "When you find out, you tell me." But to me her yarn looked perfectly even! I guess it takes practice like anything else. Anyway, the only thing I can think of to make with it right now is a scarf, but please let me know if you have any other ideas, I would love to try something different! 

-Assunta

PS- Did you know the word "spinster" is used to refer to an unmarried woman because at a time when most career paths were unavailable to women, spinning was a job that allowed a single woman to make a living for herself. Pretty cool, huh? 

New Toys and the Vista Fiber Arts Festival

A few weeks ago I bought this cute little drop spindle of Etsy to try my hand at making my own yarn!  I've practiced a little bit with it and it's a lot of fun, although it's very tricky to try and keep the weight of the yarn even. I remember when I first learned to crochet, though. It took me a long time to get my stitches even back then, so after enough practice I should be able to get my yarn even too.

This weekend I went to the Vista Fiber Arts Festival with a couple friends. I saw many wonderful things, including this beautiful spinning wheel which I had to resist buying:

...and these adorable baby alpacas:

I ended up buying some gorgeous hand-dyed wool. The booth was called Blarney Yarn, and it was so hard to choose between all of the amazing colors, but this is the one I bought. I love this blend of rich purples and sunny yellow.

My other new toy is this tiny scale. It's meant for weighing small amounts of yarn to see if you have enough to finish your project. It's also perfect for calculating shipping prices for tiny Etsy items. My previous method of holding something in my hand and thinking "Yep, that's definitely less than a pound." wasn't quite cutting it. 

Well, that was my weekend, how was yours? 

-Assunta