Tuesday, October 16, 2007

A quick catch-up

Well- it's been a while now since I've put my thoughts into blogland. I've been busy, but that's no excuse- blogging has to be one of the easiest things someone could take a little time to do. Maybe I just hate having to adjust pictures etc, etc, etc to post things. So I'll try to cut down on the pics so I can just do some entries.
Knitting- not much going on in this arena lately. I'm working on a couple of things for a friend- some fingerless gloves, and a couple other items that I won't divulge yet.
Spinning- I did get two more yarns done for the Taos Wool Festival on Oct 6th. I managed a proper boucle with a polypay core, wool/mohair blend wrapping yarn, and a poly thread binder. I liked the colors but spinning the blend was horrid! I've never had so much work involved with spinning as this one. I think it was just the mill that prepared it because the other roving I had purchased from the company was a pain too (though not nearly so bad!) It ended up pretty nice. I also spun up a quick two ply to enter in the Expert division of the handspun yarn contest. The colors turned out really pretty I think. So all in total I had three skeins to enter.
The boucle went into the novelty division (I entered my first boucle attempt last year and got only 64 points out of 105- not so hot!) and managed a third place. This year I got 102 points of 105, so there wasn't much between 1st and 3rd!

The two ply went into the Expert division- I put it as smooth and even, but there were a few thin spots so it got moved to novelty within expert. OK- I can live with that, I've only been spinning about a year and a half. I also took third on that one- with 90 points of 100. So again a close race. :)

The one I thought would do well was my spindled yarn, but even with 90 of 100 points it didn't place at all. That was only 6 points behind the 1st place too! The spinners are definitely getting better every year!
Now for the new hobby (as if I have time for more- HAH!):
Tri-weaving- I built myself a loom, but managed to mess up the nails. Didn't find out until I was weaving my first shoulder shawl for my MIL. In my engineering self's defense I was sick and had a monster headache that day I was making the marks for the nails. ;) It was still pretty.
OK- tried again. A little bigger this time (5ft instead of 4ft). I am working on something on it now (can't divulge too much since she's one of the very few who actually read this!) but it's going well and I like this. No warping and the lack of floor space taken up by the triangle loom is great!

One more thing- I opened an etsy store- Twisted Sheep- to destash some fiber and to list some of my handspun yarns, hand carded batts, handmade stitch markers (I finally have some to list in the next day or two), hand dyed yarns and fibers, and whatever else goes up as well!
Time to tend to some little monkeys, but I'll be back (much sooner I hope) :)

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