C R A F T Y

This weekend's show

2008-04-08T13:35:00.001-07:00

I spend this weekend in Orange County at the Piecemakers spring craft show. We had a great time and sold lots of yarn :) It's good to be back home in the regular swing of things, though...

Hypothesis

2008-03-19T17:53:00.000-07:00

Has anyone done a study investigating a possible link between the current crowd of urban homesteader-types - the ones with worm composters on their balconies, yeast cultures in their refrigerators, and couches covered in wool (okay, that's all me) - and degree of completion of the Little House on the Prairie book series? Well, no need, cause it's obvious. Some of us used to fall asleep to idyllic tales of field clearing and cow milking. Now we feel compelled to make stuff by hand that industrialization and urbanization took care of years ago. Actually, now that I think about it, I feel that I have a clear, narrative understanding of the process of maple syrup production, which on direct consideration could only have come from LIW herself. Also how to plow a field, how to seal up a brand-new log cabin, and what to do in a blizzard if your only shelter is a sod dugout and you need to go milk your cow. I'm also remembering a childhood terror of tornadoes, which since I didn't grow up in a trailer in Kansas under a giant leaning oak tree, can only be justified by the occasional tornado drama in LHOTP. Awesome.

By the way, the TV show was bullshit.

New handspun!

2008-03-10T11:05:00.000-07:00

Where have I been? Spinning, of course! Since I've gotten my wheel I've been loving the spinning, and have finished my first for-sale yarn and am working on my second. The one in the photo here is my first (this is the hanks hanging to dry, before they twisted into skeins). It's a chocolate-brown and white wool from the Sheep Shed Studio, plied with a sweater-recycled white silk/cotton. I'm quite happy with it - granted that I don't have enough spinning skill to turn out any other kind of yarn yet (it's squishy, slubby thick-and-thin). Actually, my drafting technique has been improving, I think, as I work on my second for-sale handspun project (deep blue and white, like Delft china, also from the Sheep Shed - gotta recycle!). Maybe on my next project I'll try for a more even yarn, but for now, I'm enjoying the funky, textured stuff I'm making.

By the way, this yarn will make it into my Etsy shop eventually, but I've slowed down my new listings there as I prepare for my first craft show in April, so there's quite a queue of new yarn waiting to make it into my Etsy shop. And that's my project for today - working on getting my booth stuff together (tables, tablecloths, etc.). I'd love to do it all from thrift store finds, but it's hard to balance that with efficiency, organization and what will fit in my little car. Clunky mismatched wooden end tables aren't going to work. It might just be an Ikea trip for me...

This week's haul

2008-02-26T10:13:00.001-08:00

Lately I've been skeining up an entire week's worth of yarn at once before tagging it and putting it away, which means that I get a table full of yarn like this photo. It's so fun to see a week's worth of work all together like that - and this wasn't even a very yarn-intensive week.

My first wheel!

2008-02-15T12:49:00.000-08:00

I got this wheel this Tuesday through Craigslist. It's presumably handmade, or at least has no brand markings. What it has are lots of imperfections and challenges, but I could afford it! My thanks to the seller, cinediva on Ravelry, for showing me how she gets the poor thing to work, and for offering her continued support as I learn the ways of this rickety old wheel.

Whoever made it was apparently committed to the classic look of the wheel (not that it came out particularly beautifully), which unfortunately means that they made most of the joints and fasteners out of wood when it clearly wasn't a strong enough material. Note, for example, the lovely binder-clip holding the footman on the shaft. This replaces a little wooden knob that screwed on - but the wooden threads couldn't take the force and were stripped away. Fortunately, these things are easily fixed by 39 cents worth of metal hardware and a modernist disregard for the hand-crafted wood style of the wheel.

The tension system, I'm told, is Irish. This is what it looks like right now. Clearly something is amiss - presumably a silly little wooden piece that broke decades ago. It works, though, especially because all I'm doing on it (so far) is plying my recycled yarn. I finished up a project I had started on my drop spindle (which will be listed in my Etsy shop next week) and have started the next one. Sure, it's not a wheel to drool over, but it's still a wheel and so definitely worth the $70 to retire my drop spindle. Yay! Now I just need to spend a couple bucks at the hardware store to fix its most egregious shortcomings, and eventually look for more bobbins that will fit it (it only came with one).

Farewell, sweet kitty

2008-02-12T14:04:00.000-08:00

My cat Ninja was killed by a car on Sunday.

This is her as a baby. She was a total yarn muncher.

I'm very sad about it. That is all.

More warm and fuzzies

2008-02-07T16:10:00.000-08:00

Continuing my edge-of-your-seat series on Etsy sellers who use my yarn, here's another great knitter, Smitten Kitten Originals.

SKO sells a huge variety of knitted scarves, face cloths, throws, and all kinds of other knitted accessories. They all look so nice, especially today when I'm sitting wrapped in a blanket in my chilly house. (Well, okay, it might be my own damn fault, considering I left the door open all day so my cats could go in and out to their hearts' content - I'm a pushover.) Anyway, the warm and fuzzy thing in the photo here is "Parker", a gorgeous scarf made with a commercial eyelash yarn and a C R A F T Y merino wool. Be sure to check out Smitten Kitten Originals' blog for more upcoming knits!

Where does all that yarn go?

2008-01-31T09:56:00.000-08:00

Well, one of the many places my yarn ends up is in items handknit by other Etsians. Here's one of them...

LanaHandknitting has made so many beautiful things with recycled yarn! This hat is made from a brown wool and a white wool/cashmere blend. She knits up all kinds of other accessories, too, like awesome gauntlets, mitts, headbands, cuffs... As she says, "I started knitting a few years ago, and I was hooked (err, "sticked") immediately. Scarves proved too boring, and sweaters too expensive; what was I to do? Living in the deliciously soggy but temperate Pacific Northwest necessitated many darling accessories, and my business was born! Hand, neck, and headwarmers began to fill my notebooks, and since I'm more than a little twisted myself, I made a serious study of "cabling theory" to enhance my classic designs." And she has a section for items whose proceeds go to charity, too!

Felty goodness

2008-01-27T13:12:00.001-08:00

I had my first intentional felting adventure yesterday, and I declare it a resounding success! I was eyeing my mason jar full of yarn scraps that I collect as I work, and wishing once again I could think of a good use for all that fiber. Duh - felted beads! They're cute, easy, and everyone loves tiny soft things. I basically followed the instructions at knitty.com which were written by starathena from Etsy. I used scraps from a brown wool that I just did, and added some pink silk to some of them too.

While the felting itself is easy, right now turning all those yarn scraps back into loose fiber is a pain in the ass. Since I'm too cheap to buy the appropriate tools (at least for now), I'm carding the scraps using a pair of cat brushes. Yeah, it takes awhile. It's not really that the actual carding takes a long time, just that I can only fit one bead's worth on at a time. Those brushes are just so damn small! Fortunately I don't need really well-carded fiber for these little guys, so I can get away with the cat brushes if I have the patience, which so far I do.

But time to add real hand carders to my coveted fiber tool roster!

Thrifting

2008-01-22T17:27:00.000-08:00

Today I went out to explore the various thrift stores in my new neighborhood of Leucadia/Encinitas, California. I have to say that, while I found a nice little crop of mid-size, mid-price thrift stores, I was disappointed by the absence of any true mega-size, dirt-cheap thrift stores (my bread and butter). Apparently I have to go all the way to Vista or Oceanside (like 10 miles! Bad for an anti-car transportation minimalist) for a Salvation Army or Goodwill. Alack. I did find a few nice specimens (i.e. sweaters) in my travels today, though, so not a total waste. And I love that all the money I end up spending goes to various good causes, like community support and animal rescue.

Kinky = bad?

2008-01-18T15:06:00.000-08:00

Today has been a day of experiments rather than accomplishments. I've been thinking for a while about trying to find a convenient way to fully straighten my yarns. Right now most yarns straighten out most of the way, and it's not really an issue in terms of knitting with them or anything, but they'd just be a little prettier in the raw if they were perfectly straight instead of having those residual recycled kinks. The internet in all its tricksiness led me to believe that this was a simple matter of waving the yarn in the general vicinity of a little steam, but this seems to not be the case. I've tried steaming yarn over the stove, in the shower and yes, even in my rice cooker/steamer, but to absolutely no avail. All I've ended up with is very hot, damp yarn with exactly as much kinkiness as before. Maybe the steaming method works well if you're starting out with incredibly kinky unwashed yarn and you want to get it to the point that I already have it, but it definitely does not improve slightly wavy yarn.

I'm also experimenting with weighting the yarn as it dries to straighten it. I'm a little apprehensive, since some people caution that this can overstretch the yarn, but I'm going with a single plastic hanger hung at the bottom of a skein, so it's pretty insignificant compared with all the water weight it already has as it's drying. In fact, I'm skeptical the hanger will straighten the yarn any more than the weight of the water already does, but we'll see...

Back to my current project: another hand-cabled yarn, which will be pretty similar to this one:

but with a pale yellow instead of the aqua. Yay spring!

New photo setup!

2008-01-15T13:34:00.000-08:00

So you may have noticed that my yarn photos have changed a bit. When I moved to a new apartment last week, I lost my convenient outdoor photo location. Plus I'd been trying to find a way to get more controlled photos. Plus I'm contemplating moving to a cloudy, rainy climate in the fall. So I needed an alternative to the outdoor sunshine setup.

I found really easy instructions online for how to make a lightbox for under $10. Mine ended up costing 69 cents and took me about 20 minutes. And here are the results - this is my newest posting, a silk/cashmere blend that is so awesome. I really like the photos I get. They're much softer and less sharply shadowed than the sunlight method, but you still see all the really nice texture. I probably need to add more lighting still, though (I wish the background were more white and less grey).

I also coincidentally just replaced my camera. The old one, an Olympus C-4040Z died (it was seven years old, which I thought was pretty good for a digital camera). I'd wanted to replace it with something smaller anyway, so I went out and got myself a Fujifilm Finepix F50. I love it. It's so tiny (after years of using a big old clunker) and takes beautiful photos. Yay!

Like a phoenix from the ashes...

2008-01-14T16:52:00.000-08:00

Well, okay, more like a poor, forgotten, dusty little Cheezit surprise under the couch. It's true, I've neglected my (imaginary) reading public - only one post and I fell off the wagon. But I'm starting anew, and I'm unemployed, so I should actually have time to keep up with it! Not that you care.

One of the more dangerous elements of my current unemployment is the fact that we seem to have been left with residual cable service. We're one week in (the unemployment coincides with a move) and still getting that demon signal, and since it's not even clear that our apartment itself is legal, I'm not sure the cable man will ever notice. My oblivious husband does not seem to see the danger this presents, but for me the brain rot is already setting in. Not that I've ever been or ever will be a true TV junkie, but there is a definite correlation between the knowledge that there's always a Law and Order waiting for me and a decline in creative output (and input, for that matter).

So I was watching Antiques Roadshow last night (it's PBS, so it's okay!) and now I'm confused economically. The prices put on some of those items are outrageous, and even if only a subset will ever be sold for anything like those figures, there's an awful lot of money involved in passing around old dishes. I'm all for finding value in the old and the busted (okay, I'm obsessed), but if you have an heirloom plate sitting in your closet that you then sell to a collector for $10,000 to put on his shelf, is that any less conspicuous consumption than if he buys a Porsche or a $1,000 martini? Yes, the plate can be considered an investment (so okay, there's some difference),
but even as an investment, isn't this a whole lot of artificial wealth? I'm not an economics scholar, so this is an honest question, not pure criticism. I guess I'm just thoroughly perplexed at an entire industry based on passing things around.

But that's probably just because I have a heart of ice.

Well, if everyone else is doing it...

2007-09-29T08:21:00.000-07:00

My inaugural post! Well, I'm up early on a Saturday (7:30) because I couldn't sleep in, which I think officially makes me old and boring. Also, I'm planning on going to the monthly Salvation Army half-off sale this morning to stock up on sweaters to unravel, which means I need to get there right at 9:00 before all the good stuff is gone. So this morning I'm also ridiculously cheap. Well, I guess you've got to play to your strengths.

I recycle old sweaters into yarn and sell it on my Etsy site, so this blog will be a lot about all the yarn that goes through my life.

Currently listing: a cool red ribbon yarn. Ribbon yarns are one of my favorites: they're so easy to knit with and even just a simple stockinette stitch will look awesome.

Currently unraveling: a greenish-blue linen/cotton yarn, probably a sport weight or so.