giant balls!

1010-freepeople
Originally uploaded by kismet09.

There's a store in the Prudential Mall that uses these balls as a display item. Some of them were a good foot and a half across. I covet them.

Mistake Rib Goodness

I forgot to put this up before! This is that scarf I was working on in NYC. Doubled Noro Silk Garden, alternating every two rows with some handspun that I navajo-plyed, thus allowing the colors to stay together. The bright green isn't as bright as it looks in this picture -- I just took it and it's getting dark, and I had to play with the exposure a bit to make it look even vaguely true-to-life. You also get a nice shot of my purple door, which we painted this summer.

Yarn found

My knitting life revolves around hats and wrist warmers, in prep for a fair in Pittsburgh. I'm not making the fastest progress, but I'm getting there. I finally corralled my yarn into bins so I could take a real stock in what I have. These are the three most recently finished (or mostly finished):

	left to right: hand-dyed BFL; Plymouth Encore (I swear it isn't that big in real life); hand-dyed merino, kid sized
	left to right: superchunky hand-dyed merino; a woolarina handpaints worsted; some Classic Elite Wings that I dyed (mmm alpaca blend - this is a great use for it); Brooks Farm, for me!

That last pair on the right is the first pair I've actually made with plans to keep them for myself, and I've probably done at least a dozen other pairs before these, given as gifts or sold at fairs. I thought I had run out of yarn about 5 rows shy of having a matching set, but thankfully managed to dig up a small ball at the very bottom of the last bin that I rummaged through frantically today. Phew. So, this pair will be for me to wear with my brownish side of my wardrobe, and I'm sure I'll have a purplish pair soon enough. But maybe not before the next fair.

yay! new camera! and new spinning!

I haven't really learned to use it well yet, but I just bought a new camera so that I could load more pics to woolarina.com, and my old camera was taking three pictures before draining the battery. Just so you know that I haven't been slacking, here's stuff I've spun in the last month or so:



I've taken to dyeing four ounces at a time (a good amount to wrap in plastic wrap and steam on the stovetop) and then spinning it. Four ounces gives me enough yarn to do something with it, but not so much that I get bored with the colors. Now I just have to decide which ones to keep as yarn, and which ones become hats and other things.

trains are perfect for knitting

I had a work meeting in NYC, and took the train to and from, since it's much easier than flying (and also, my brain hates flying). I had packed one knitting project, which was the mistake rib scarf yarns, not even casted on yet. As it turned out, the yarns weren't quite as compatible as I had hoped. The weights were good, but the black's silk content gave it a really different feel than the merino, and the black was a little too stark of a contrast. So, I tromped around the city, checking out options at various yarn stores. With the help of a lovely salesperson at The Point, I decided on doubling Noro Silk Garden against my multi-color spun yarn (other options considered included a couple of Uruguayan handpaints, and some tweedy yarns, but I loved the idea of the two yarns with fairly long color repeats).

I had to wrestle quite a bit with the Noro -- since I had to double it, that meant buying two skeins, and trying to get the colorways on both to line up exactly. Luckily, I had the help of a friend who has more spatial sense than I do, and with some minor cutting and reballing multiple times, we had it worked out. I knew I wouldn't have quite enough yarn, but still only bought two balls. I'm not sure what my logic was there -- probably that I was already spending quite a lot of money (since I also felt compelled to pick up a skein of Lorna's Laces Worsted in Mineshaft -- so pretty). I ended up buying two more skeins of Silk Garden at Downtown Yarns, in a different colorway, again wrestling them to match up, color by color.

I knitted the whole scarf, starting Friday at the yarn store, finishing up on the train on the way home yesterday. Sadly, my new camera won't be here until Tuesday, so no finished object picture -- just a less-than-great quality camera shot pic of the tasty cupcake at Point, and my SG, mid-re-skeining.