The Beekeeper's quilt

If you have spent any time on ravelry recently, you have probably encountered the beekeeper's quilt somewhere along the road...
The pattern has only been around for a few short months, but the ingenuity of not having to line a throw, being able to use up leftover sock scraps and having the gratification of having tiny little finished objects all the time must have helped to make this pattern a bit of a phenomenon!
This picture is off her blog, I hope Stephanie can forgive me for 'borrowing' it. :) Most yarns in the original are koigu, a yarn that is quite hard to find in the UK and if you do, don't forget to empty your savings account beforehand because you will need it! I can't quite justify the expense, so will mainly be working with my own hand dyed sock yarns and leftovers from my sock knitting.

This pattern actually came at the exact right time for me as I have amassed quite a stash of sock yarns, but have finally realised that I am really not much of a sock knitter, or at least that I have knitted all the patterns I wanted to try out (my running total of finished pairs of socks is approaching two dozen). Either way, I have already started picking whole skeins out of my stash and will probably add a few mini skein sets to my etsy shop to make good use out of the rest of it. :) If anybody wants to do some swapping, I'd most likely be up for that as well!

Anyway, here is my current progress of yet to be stuffed little hexipuffs, as those little cuties are called. I've been using up some Noro sock yarn as well and will be using some thin handspun later on. Considering I only started four days ago I'm not doing too badly. ;) Is anybody else knitting one?

A big welcome to the Tour de Fleece!! Day 1

Yes, it's back and it started today!! I am once again proud team member of Laila of LaiGrai's amazing team - this year the focus is vintage carnival and my inspiration is the snake charmer. :)

Handily my fresh fibre order just arrived in time as well - it might not look like much, but this is about 20kg of different fibre ranging from BFL locks through soy silk to Mulberry silk and golden Angelina (yummy). When I got back from work I started a cocoon yarn with the dyed fibre and white linen. The last picture shows my latest project: degumming silk. Not sure if it will work yet, but I accidentally ordered gummed silk throwsters waste, so it has to be done.

I've joined a spin along...

...and it's time to get my art yarn mojo back in action! I've joined the most recent of Laila's amazing spin alongs over on Lai Grai's ravelry group, where some of my most favourite spinners hang out!
First off I received a goodie pack containing a textured batt and lots of little trinkets. The theme was 'vintage', so I knew straight away that it was one I had to join! There were some extra fibres, silk cocoons, ribbons, fabric strips, wooden beads, beautiful linen thread....

From the beginning I planned on carding up some more fibre myself to beef up my skein, so I went ahead and dug up some matching fibres - I am due to do some dyeing, so my choices were a little limited, but to 'vintage' I can always mix something together. :) The batt in the front is Laila's gorgeous piece, the two simpler ones out back are my additions.

The last picture shows the pieces I decided to include in the yarn, threaded and ready to go. I mixed in some bling in the form of golden sequins, golden ric rac and matte golden glass beads threaded in groups of 7 onto Laila's linen thread.

Pictures of the finished yarn coming soon!!

Handspun shrug

I started knitting a little shrug with one of my handspun yarns, the style is a thin textured single, something I spin quite a lot for the shop, but also for my personal use. :) I dyed some organic Merino wool in different shades of yellow and carded it up with undyed Merino wool, white linen, some silk and silk noil and a dash of golden Angelina sparkle. I hope the yarn will be enough for the main part of this shrug and then I'll spin a complementary yarn for the ribbing around it. More details on my Ravelry page. The pattern is from Drops, who I really like for their versatile free patterns and their yarns are very reasonably priced as well, although I haven't yet worked with any of it.
I really like how it is coming along so far, it's a great pattern for handspun yarns!

The last picture is from the Drops page, just to give you an idea of how it should look in the end. :)
Of course mine is a little chunkier and nice and yellow!

Handspun button sweater WIP

After being so busy preparing for my recent craft fair, I have really been enjoying the calm last few days. I even finally started knitting a cardigan from my handspun Merino/silk singles (The type often appearing in my shop as well). The pattern I am basing it on is the button sweater by 'Oh my stars', a design I have been meaning to try out for ages. It is a top down raglan with a wide button band. The colours on this picture seem a bit washed out as you can mainly just see the shinyness of the silk... I will get some better pictures after more progress. As I am making it up as I go, there are already a few things I would do differently to improve fit, but I kept going as I plan on knitting another raglan in this style eventually anyway...

By coincidence (ok, not really, I just buy a lot of handmade buttons) I already have some lovely ceramic buttons that would go brilliantly with this sweater! http://www.etsy.com/view_transaction.php?transaction_id=9226423

Fight the WIPs!

How many different projects do knitters and crafters always have going on at the same time? I am definitely no exception and I am currently vowing to fight the WIPs (works in progress).
First of all, I don't just knit and spin (although that would certainly already take up enough of my spare time!), but I also dabble in various sewing projects. I keep seeing (and buying) beautiful fabrics, but somehow I never get around to finish anything. Somehow I ended up with a huge stash of fabrics and have now decided that I should really start working through them instead of buying more all the time. One of my purchases last year was an autumnal jelly roll from uberstitch on etsy. On the left you can see how that is coming along now, I finally made a big dent into the progress of this simple quilt!

My current knitting project are my latvian mittens and I have almost finished the first one! Ravelry Ravelry link.

And then, let's not forget my sweet little striped cardigan, the eternal WIP. Ravelry link.

Well, either way, I am trying really hard not to get side tracked in this endeavor and hopefully it will result in a few new pieces of clothing and a bit less in my stash dresser. :P

Latvian mittens

What happened? Well, quite a bit, actually.
For a start there was my birthday on the 2.2., in February I had a range of guests over for various reasons, I also finally wound my 700g of latvian wool into balls by hand instead of getting a yarn winder, started knitting an adorable pair of mittens from the book latvian mittens, which is simply amazing. It features such a variety of charts and instructions that you are bound to mix and match your favourite mitten pattern. In other news, I rediscovered my sewing machine once again and am sewing my way towards a full-sized quilt in autumnal colours (I know, wrong season, but by the time I am done it might well be autumn in 5 years time....). The fabric is from a jelly roll I bought on etsy a good while ago. :P

Spinning.... yeah, sometimes... not as much as usual though.

4 weeks.

As some of you may know, I will soon be leaving my job, flat and life in Germany behind and will be moving to the UK. Well, and this 'soon' has been nearing really quickly and it is now in only 4 weeks time! Am I panicking? Perhaps a little bit. Did I have a clue as to how big my fabric collection is? Not really.

What I have been doing the last few weeks though, was to spin as many yarns as possible and use up all the little odds and ends I have lying around. A great side effect of using up some odd bits has been the creation of a new yarn style called 'Art museum'. I have since spun another 2 skeins of this style and am spinning up another one right now. It is an addictive spinning style and I am planning on adding it to my shop to stay. I mainly used wools and some silks and other fibres to create this bulky yarn. The coils which are featured throughout are safely locked into position and do not move around.

Stack of rolags

In the absence of a drum carder, I card all my mixed fibres with hand carders. This sometimes results in a huge mountain of rolags. :P

On the top are some blue/white mixes and the bottom is subtly dyed Merino/silk with white organic linen. I will be adding a few meters from my treasured collection of cotton and linen laces to these fibres and spin them up into something with an old time feel to it. :)

TDF Day 8

Today I was mainly carding, but I also spun a few yards at the lake with my Turkish spindle, but alas, no pictures...

The one yarn I properly worked on is my pirate queen:
It will be plied up with beads next.

TDF Day 6

Today I finally finished my ocean treasure yarn! The beaded skein is about 200m of a fine 2ply yarn. From the same rolags I also spun a matching corespun yarn. :)

TDF Day 5

On day 5 of the Tour de Fleece I worked a bit more on my ocean treasure yarn, pictured are the two singles. They are both spun from handcarded rolags and the bottom ply has lots of ocean type beads, pearls and shells in it.

TDF Day 2

The second day of the Tour de Fleece saw some more stash busting. For my first yarn I just randomly spun up leftover fibre (mostle wool and silk) and then plied it with thread. Whilst doing this I added lots of chunky coils - and the good thing is, they don't move at all, they are really well secured. It was sadly already dark when I took a lot of the pictures, but here we go:



































I then went on to work on the rolags I carded the night before. I spun up a single yarn with this Alpaca/wool/silk/linen fibre and added strips of a very sweet dotted cotton fabric. I let a red sparkle thread wrap around the yarn and included many types of gems on the way. Again, the pictures aren't the best, but it is late and I wanted to post this. :)






















































The last thing I did today was to prepare everything for my first nautical themed yarn of the race: Treasure of the seven seas. I carded hand dyed organic Falkland wool with Merino/silk, hand dyed silk noil and throwsters waste silk filament. All natural fibres and the yarn is going to really special. I beaded shell pieces, small shells, freshwater pearls and teal glass crystals onto a sparkle thread and am ready to spin this up with some sequins.

TDF Day 1

On my first day of the Tour de Fleece I spun 100g of a bulky, hand dyed Merino/silk single yarn as well as something more arty. The art yarn is called twister and had as a main purpose to get rid of some of my uglier fibres in the stash. These include horrible commercially dyed colours or batts with weird glitz effect... I carded them all together on my hand cards and hoped for the best. As a single yarn I still thought it looked rather awful, but once I used this new twisty technique it looked really adorable!

'Earth Goddess' handspun yarn WIP

My latest yarn is called Earth Goddess and features just about everything nice and brown. Oh, except, I ended up not using the ricrac, as it would have made the yarn too stiff. But I did use hand dyed soft wool, sequins, embroidered cotton fabric, Angelina (sparkle) and a beautiful linen/cotton tweedy thread to ply. I also used some Tunesian wool and Karakul wool, which are both rougher wools, but with a very intrigueing range of colours.

Lady Gaga art yarn

Sometimes I get inspired by the weirdest things, but this time I surprised myself. :D
The pop/dance singer Lady Gaga has been the inspiration behind this latest art yarn. I just find it intriguing how she makes herself into a piece of art and how she uses style to create her own identity. Her music is kind of catchy as well, although I wouldn't like to admit that, lol.

For this yarn I grabbed fibres in black, white, metallic light blue and added blonde goat fibre for her hair (nothing personal, but it does look exactly like it!). I also strung matching beads on a sparkle thread and added sequins and ric rac. The result is a yarn I could easily see her use in her stage wear (apparently she makes a lot of it herself), but it also incorporates her whole look in one skein, which is pretty amazing.

Even if you have never heard of her though this yarn is a bit of a stunner. :P

Elegant grey art yarn WIP

My latest art yarn is handspun from natural grey Alpaca/Tussah silk with dark grey sequins and real freshwater pearls in matching colours. It might well be one of my most elegant yarns to date and I will soon be able to post pictures of the finished yarn. Here is what went into it:

Corespun WIP

Just a quick picture of something I am working on right now. It is a yarn corespun from hand carded batts I made entirely from hand dyed fibres (Merino/silk and Mohair curls) and lots of Angelina sparkle in many different colours. The yarn is everything from yellow to orange and pink, I really love these colours!

I want candy, finally finished this handspun yarn!

Some people might remember my post about a yarn called 'I want candy' - well, it has been finished and is now available as a big skein and a smaller skein. It is handspun entirely from hand dyed wool scraps and looks quite delightful. As there are two skeins available, this would definitely be enough for a nice project. I would love to see how this knits up and am actually quite tempted to take it out of the shop again... but I do have a policy that I will have to put one of my other 'keepers' into the shop if I want to keep another one - and I love them all, haha.

Other than that I have just finished a really fun yarn corespun from hand dyed Mohair locks. It is so soft and fluffy and due to its bright colours I called it 'Samba'. So far I have spun two skeins of this and it is so addictive! However right now I got caught up in spinning for quite a few custom orders, which I love to do. Especially my soy silk seems to be pretty popular at the moment - I even had to order more despite my last pretty chunky order, lol.

This weekend will see a lot of spinning. I am actually working on a completely gorgeous custom order of a new style which I might include in the shop in future, it is just so gorgeous! Also, there are still plenty of yarns to be listed and two interesting art yarns I have to take pictures of first. :)