The San Diego Yarn Crawl 2017

This past Saturday I carpooled down to the San Diego area with a couple of friends for another fun yarn crawl! We met lots of cool people who ran the shops, made the yarn, or were fellow yarn enthusiasts like us. We visited six shops total, plus the Yarnover Truck (which, as you may already have guessed, is a truck full of yarn). There were many more shops we didn't see and the yarn crawl officially ran Thursday through Sunday! Now that's a lot of yarn crawling!

There was so much beautiful yarn and fiber that I couldn't possibly buy everything I would have liked to. I did stay within my budget and get three skeins or yarn that I absolutely love!

The name of the one on the left is exactly what you would expect it to be: Neapolitan Ice Cream, by Candy Skein. It is fingering weight. The other two are Rainbow in the Dark by The Fiber Seed, DK weight.

Stay tuned to see what what these skeins turn into. Also, the Vista Fiber Fiesta is coming up in October so there is even more yarn in my future!

-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!

Surprise! A Light Box!

This is the surprise I was hinting at a couple of weeks ago. I finally bought a light box!

With light box

It's just the most simple, tent-style version you can get, but look how much better the colors and details of this yarn look! I'm very excited for how this little investment will help my projects shine in my blog and my Etsy shop.

Without light box

And yes, I'm still working on plying my blue alpaca yarn from Tour de Fleece. I'll admit my motivation has gone down since the Tour ended, but I am happy with how it's turning out. I decided to ply two strands of the blue with one strand of silver thread. It's one of my favorite color combinations, as some of you may know.

Have a great week!

-Assunta

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

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

Wonderful Gifts for Creating!

Now that January is almost over, I'm finally getting around to showing off some of the wonderful gifts I received this Christmas.

Everything I got was awesome but since this is a crafting blog I'm going to focus on the crafting gifts. My mom made me this crafting bag, complete with pockets and matching holders for knitting needles, crochet hooks, scissors, sunglasses, gift cards, tissues, and even a coffee cup sleeve. Now I can organize all my stuff in style!

My best friend got me this adorable Star Wars Amigurmi book. I can't wait to make all the characters!

My mom-in-law got me this gorgeous wool when she found out I that I was getting into spinning. This will make such beautiful yarn! She also got me a lotion bar that is very nice for  keeping my hands from drying out and snagging my yarn. 

And last but not least, I got about 16 skeins of this lovely, cozy yarn. This is what I am using for my current project, which you will see soon!

So that's a pretty good sneak peak at what my next few projects might entail. I hope you are all avoiding the bugs that are going around and that it's not too cold where you are!

-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

Doll Hair Latch Hook Method Tutorial

After I made my armature video last week, I decided to make an updated doll hair tutorial as well. I made one a couple years ago that some of you might remember, but I wanted to try it with my new filming process. I think this video came out much better, although there are still some blurry parts. I think I may have overdone the lighting in some shots. I should mention that my Mom, the remarkable Momma Cat, is the one who taught me the latch hook method as a great way to make doll hair!

Here is the video, let me know what you think! If you like it, please "like" and subscribe to my Youtube channel!

I will be dreaming Portland dreams next week but I do have a post prepared to go up while I am on vacation. I can't wait to see my family and friends up north!

-Assunta