Posted under Handspun
Lichens, it’s what’s for breakfast! This yarn was spun after I spun up two different plies for yarns I got sick of working on. So I just said ‘Screw it,’ and plied them together. The olive colored ply is a corespun yarn, so once I block it, it should fluff up pretty big. 80.5 yards, 3.25 ounces.
Hey, another finished quilt! Woot! I’m now caught up to where I need to be for February, and, it has beads on it, too, so it counts towards my bead goal! Yay!
I’m calling this one ‘Little Red Boat in the Big Black Sea,’ for obvious reasons. I finished the quilt top in late spring 2005, and haven’t worked on it until yesterday. All of the fabrics are hand-dyes that I did, I used 5 different colors of thread to quilt it, and I hand sewed on the beads after the quilt was all done. It’s a wee little quilt, only 21″ x 27″ but it looks nice on my wall and makes me happy. Yay!
Posted under Quilts
Woo hoo! Finally, I finished my first quilt of the year. Hooray! I decided to ditch working on the Tahquemenon quilt for now, since I totally was not in the mood to do hand quilting. Instead, I dug this up. I had pieced the top together, so it just needed quilted and bound. It’s only about 32″ square, so I figured that would be doable for my first quilted project. I stitched in the ditch across the center pieced section, thought it looked like ass, then did the big stipples around the border. I still thought it looked like ass, so I did a really messy echoing of the stipples and I turned out to really like that. There are a few rectangles in the center that have tiny stipples in them, too.
The double stipples looked like double vision to me, and it reminded me of the tripped out elephant on the label of the Delirium Tremens beer. So, that’s why I’m calling this wallhanging ‘Delirium Tremens.’ I’m just glad it’s done. Yay!
Posted under Handspun
Vote Saxon handspun yarn. Spun up from roving balls I combed combining wool, mohair, and nylon. 154 1/2 yards, 5 1/4 ounces. Navaho plied. This yarn is kind of depressing to me. It looks a little sad. Travis likes it, though, so maybe I’ll weave him something out of it (it’s kind of a guy yarn, isn’t it?). It does look a bit tweedy, which is kind of cool.
Posted under Beaded & Handspun
Dust Bowl. 98 1/2 yards, 3 ounces. Corespun using cream colored quilting thread with brown beads as the core, and some really soft Lilac Jacob/Angora blend fiber (gifted to me by Dianne) as the wrapper.
Sherbert. Superwash wool, navaho plied. 204 1/2 yards, 4 ounces. Fiber dyed by Tricia of Earthly Hues!
Posted under Knitting Patterns
Posted under Beaded & Handspun
Commander Fuzzbomb! The fiber is a combo of primarily mohair and alpaca with some nylon sparkle and wool mixed in. The yarn is a corespun yarn, using a metallic thread as a core. Before spinning, I put some brown cats-eye beads on the thread. I spun the yarn by holding the fiber at a 90 degree angle to the thread, and just let the fiber wrap loosely around it. It came out to be 127 yards and 5 5/8 ounces, and since it’s beaded, it gets to count towards my bead goal as well. So now I’ve made up for January and completed my February bead goal, too. Hooray!
Hot Mess. This is another corespun yarn, using metallic thread again as the core, and a bunch of different bits of junk leftover fiber as the fluff. 106 yards, 2 7/8 ounces.
Posted under Sewing
I made curtains for the craft room. Previously, there had been some towels and pieces of fabric covering the windows, because I never got around to making any curtains. I kind of like these evern though the two shades of lime green don’t match each other at all. My original intent was to hang these the other way, with the poofy transparent pleated green at the bottom, but I had the thought that Ellie would probably destroy these even quicker if that was the fabric she could most easily mess with, so I flipped them upside down. I think they work a lot better this way.
I made them really short so that Ellie wouldn’t inadvertently lay on the edge of the curtain and pull the rod down (she’s done that before). They wound up floating about a 1/2 inch off the window frame.
I find that the more I sew, the less I measure. Whether that’s due to overconfidence or just plain laziness (probably the latter), I’m not sure. When I made these, the main fabric was just so slinky that after trying to work on them sensibly, I just said “Screw it,” and started hacking at the excess fabric with shears. I think they turned out okay. Not professionally done, by any means, but a hell of a lot nicer than towels and scrap fabric. If Ellie shreds these, I’ll eventually weave some replacements.
Posted under Handspun
Abalone supercoiled yarn. It’s ridiculously heavy for its weight – 7 ounces, 15.5 yards. Jesus. I was pretty ‘meh’ about this one, especially since I thought the yardage would have been longer, but then I spun this:
This one is called ‘Alien Poops.’ The base fiber is a sticky Lincoln wool, and the slubs are some leftover junk fiber from combing out the Abalone fiber balls. This is the first yarn of this type that I’ve ever spun, and I’m skeptical as to how well the slubs will hold up during the washing process. Hopefully, they just kind of felt together. I finally got a skein over 16 yards, this one weighing 6 3/4 ounces and measuring 195 yards.
I find myself happier with Abalone since I made a coordinating yarn:
Posted under Toy
Wool plushies inspired by the TV show, Lost. Yes, I am that much of a geek, apparently. I made a polar bear (I tried putting a Dharma logo patch on its butt, but it came out kind of sloppy):
John Locke’s kidney:
And my favorite, Sawyer’s fish biscuit:
There may be more Lost-themed crafts in my future – I made a big list of potential ones. 
