love list: a little lace

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There are a few things I've learned since I've become a knitter. Hats are fast and making up decreases as you go is a bad idea. The ribbing on a sweater always seems slower than you think it will be. Don't pull your colorwork stitches too tight unless you want a hat that sits on top of your head (or fits a child). Always. Always. Always. Check. Your. Gauge. (I'm unfortunately still working on this one). And I've also learned that some of my favorite patterns are simple, but beautiful.

Carrie Bostick Hoge really gets this, I think. Her designs are beautiful, classic, but interesting. She never over-does it when it comes to techniques and special effects in her patterns, adding just enough to every pattern to keep things interesting, but not stressful. Two great examples are some of her designs that include just a LITTLE bit of lace. I love the Sibella pullover with its classic shape, lots of stockinette, but lots of visual interest and lacy design around the yoke. Another great one is her Lola shawl, which is totally a shawl I could see myself knitting and wearing. I also love cabinfour's  Morning Light socks for this same reason, visual interest on the top of the foot but easy knitting everywhere else. 

I'm not even sure what I'm doing rounding up knitting patterns right now, dreaming of new projects when I have something close to seven projects on my to-do list! But sometimes it's just fun to dream. :) Lace, I love you - a little. 

a little giveaway

Hey friends!

I've been feeling a lot of warm and fuzzy feelings since the blog re-launch and connecting with so many wonderful fiber friends, so I thought I'd do a little giveaway. This is some 100% alpaca that I spun from Echoview Alpaca Cloud back this spring. It's between DK - Worsted weight and is a little thick and thin, just as handspun should be. It would make a wonderful hat or mitten project, since it is so soft and squishy, definitely something next-to-skin!

If you'd like me to send you this lovely in the mail, leave a comment below and I'll pick a name on Friday at 5 PM EST. I hope you love it!

Happy Hump Day!

UPDATE: Congratulations Vicky! I'll send you an email to claim your prize and I hope you love it!

swatching for timberline

I was talking with sweet Jennifer in Asheville this weekend about knitting, and life, and husbands. And knitting for husbands! The fun (and challenging) thing about knitting for my husband is that not being a knitter, he has no idea what I can and cannot do. He sees a knitted thing and says, "Can you make me that?" As is the case with Timberline. He saw it in my favorites on Ravelry and loved it. A richly cabled, seamed, shawl collared cardigan. Have I ever knitted a cardigan before? Nope. Have I ever picked up for a collar before? Nope. Have I ever knit a seamed sweater before? Nope. And yet, here we are, and I'm swatching for Timberline. 

The swatch that I knit took me nearly an hour, so this baby is going to be a marathon! We chose Knit Picks Wool of the Andes for its huge color selection and affordability (and they answered all of my questions about where their wool comes from, which made my ethical side very happy). This color is "Opal Heather" and it has a lovely variegation and has been pretty easy to knit with. This pattern I took from the back chart, and should have probably knit the whole piece, you'll notice that its uneven as I omitted one of the side cables that frame the center cable. I started down a needle size from the recommended and still came out to 25 x 4" instead of 31 x 4". So I will be going down at least another needle size in a second swatch, if not 2 sizes. After listening to Julie Hoover's interview on Woolful on my roadtrip, I'm thinking it might have something to do with the material needles I'm using. I'm pretty dedicated to my Addi clicks, but maybe it's worth trying another material?

I still have a tumultuous relationship with swatching. I know I need to do it, and I for sure want the garments I knit to fit! But I sometimes just can't wait to get started and swatching for a piece like this takes much longer than I'd like. Any tips from master swatchers out there to help make this process any easier? 

asheville is for (fiber) lovers

Sometimes when I'm visiting a new city, things just click. While on a business trip this week, I was able to take the morning to really dive in to all that Asheville had to offer for fiber enthusiasts, and it totally clicked for me! I would have loved to stay for a whole weekend (or week!), but in a morning I was able to take in so much. 

I started my morning by driving about 15 minutes outside of downtown Asheville and went to Echoview Fiber Mill. (Well, technically, I started my morning at Izzy's Coffee Den. Such a good veggie bagel!) It was a pretty quiet morning there, and I could have spent hours in the storefront looking through all of their naturally dyed yarn, roving and batts. They also carry a great array of wool products, felted wool dryer balls, hand-knit socks and accessories. 

They only give tours of the mill on Tuesdays, but they had a great viewing area above the storefront where you could see the whole process from start to finish, from the bags of fleece to the piles of roving. It was my first time at a fiber mill and it was too awesome. 

My next stop on my trip was to Earth Guild in downtown Asheville. They have every tool you could ever want as a handcrafter, from spinning, dyeing and natural dyeing, carding, knitting, crochet, sewing, and pottery, as well as a selection of yarn and books. I went there specifically to buy some natural dyeing materials, and the woman who worked there was so helpful in assisting me with the materials I would need to mordant and dye cutch and indigo. I was especially taken with their window set up where their floor looms and spinning wheels sat waiting to be purchased. That is a dream I'll be able to fulfill someday, I hope!

My final stop of the morning was to Asheville Home Crafts a few blocks away in the Historic Grove Arcade, a sweet yarn shop with a great selection of yarn and fiber from the Asheville area, including some Romney roving that the shop owner had brought in from her farm that morning! Asheville is such a cool mix of being deeply agricultural and also with a great urban scene (I didn't eat a bad meal the whole time I was there!). 

I have also heard great things about Purl's Yarn Emporium just a few blocks away. Such a dream to be in a city where there are 3 yarn stores within walking distance of each other! 

By far though, the best part of this fiber adventure was meeting up with Jennifer (@jaykay_knits)!! We originally connected early this year via Instagram, where I fell in love with her beautiful knitting projects and life in the mountains. She is even sweeter and more awesome in person and we had so much fun chatting for a few hours over lunch. Be sure to check out her blog and her Instagram for wonderful peeks into her wonderful knitting and life in Asheville! She and a few others were actually planning a crafty meet up on Saturday and I was so bummed I had to leave on Friday afternoon. This little fiber community of ours is so great, and I can't wait to come back and visit with Jennifer and so many others soon!

Asheville has my heart and hopefully the goods I brought back will last me until I get to visit next! :) 

sewing stitches: purl bee linen tunic with gathered shoulders

I did a thing. I made a top! 

Started and finished: August 6, 2015

Fabric: Pinstripe Linen Slub purchased at JoAnn's, 1 yard

Pattern: Purl Bee Linen Tunic with Gathered Shoulders

I saw this pattern on the Purl Bee when it was released a couple of weeks ago, and while it's not the typical top that I go for when thinking about what I like to wear, I was completely infatuated with how easy it seemed to construct. Four rectangles, and you gather the shoulders. Done! Not having a ton of experience with sewn garments (outside of some doll clothes I made when I was little), this seemed like a good starting point. 

Being a completely novice sewer(?), the directions were really easy to follow, except for the description of how to sew the channels at the sleeves to lace the cording through. (This could also have been because I was doing this at midnight and slightly delirious.) But I got there! And after being SUPER skeptical when I first tried it on, I now really like this top. And maybe most importantly, I proved to myself that I can, in fact, sew in a straight line.

I'm now more motivated than ever to bust out my vintage sewing machine for simple projects like this. Like knitting, it is such a thrill to be able to take a huge piece of nothing and make it into something beautiful and useful, and at this stage in my life it's cool that I can make clothes that are going to fit me EXACTLY the way I want them to. It's really empowering. Huzzah!

I hope everyone has made it to the new website and is digging the new look! After blogging with my old platform for almost a year I knew it was time to make a change, there were a lot of things I wanted to update about the website and honestly the easiest scenario was just to change platforms completely. I'm still tweaking a bit but am excited for the future of the blog and hope you are too!

Is it too early to make a post about winter?

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To be fair, it was recently Christmas in July. And while I agree that Christmastime deserves recognition during more than one month of the year, something about it being 87 degrees at night just doesn't get me in as festive of a mood. :)

Anyways - as we inch closer and closer to the start of school, bouquets of sharpened pencils, end of summer clearance, and the like, I get so excited. I've been enjoying seasonal summer food this season in a new and wonderful way with my job at the farm; our whole menu this week has been planned around ripe tomatoes. Glorious. But still - on some level, summer is a season I get through to get to fall and winter. It might be blasphemous, but it's true. 

What's exciting about planning my fall and winter knitting is that I actually already have the yarn for all three of these projects! The Lila Winter sweater is a bulky variation on a shape that has really been popular this year, and I have plans to dye some wool for it before the season is over that I currently have in my stash. The Trellis Scarf is already in progress in worsted weight, after frogging a failed shawl design and refusing to let the 2 skeins of Flax Down that the hubs gifted me go to waste on a crummy pattern. And then, Timberline. I'm a bit scared of this pattern. The schematic is comprehensive but daunting, this will be my first seamed sweater, and the charts, while very doable, are LONG. Just what I get for letting B pick out whatever men's sweater he liked from my favorites on Ravelry ;). It will be a fun challenge, but I can see it also being a marathon. The swatch alone took me an hour. But we've bitten the bullet and decided to go for Knit Picks Wool of the Andes for the beautiful color and affordability. (And they answered all of my questions on where they source their wool, which made me pretty happy.)

The great thing about these patterns too, they are all so cozy. We don't get "real" winter in NC the way so many others do, but I literally get so excited thinking of snuggling up in all of these knits with snow falling outside and watching a movie. It's going to be glorious. 

Only 148 days til Christmas!

And only 79 days until the NY Sheep and Wool Festival in Rhinebeck, NY! I just found out today that I'll be going again with Virginia and her crew. Anyone else planning on going this year??

Love: spinning dreams

Top Left/Top Right/Bottom Left/Bottom Right

I'm spinning my life away these days. The past two weekends we have been laying low, staying out of the heat, spinning, reading about spinning, and dreaming about it. There are so many beautiful places to buy fiber in the U.S., and these are some of my favorites I've found so far. I would love to find others - there is so much out there I want to spin, and so little time to do it. :)

It's so funny with my spinning, I have been gravitating towards these vibrant, almost neon colors but in reality I love to wear neutrals (at the store this weekend, I picked out a tan, navy and gray top. And black pants. Ha!). Eventually, I'm going to have to reconcile what I like to spin with what I like to knit and what I like to wear. But for now, I'm loving these colors as I get better and better. 

Cheers to summer and color!

Spinning in color

Continuing in my recent trend of working with LOTS of color this summer, I worked on a couple of spinning projects this past week that were filled with bright color changes, soft fiber, and all around just a great time. 

I first found Melissa of Hey Lady Hey months ago via the Woolful podcast (really, my source for every fiber goodness ever) and just made my first purchase this past week. I'm so sad it took me this long! The fiber pictured above is Targhee dyed in a colorway called "Flower Power". The picture doesn't totally portray its range of colors: pinks and orange and lots of green and blue. I used my drop spindle (my only spindle...so far) and plied together 2 oz each. My spindle was SO full towards the end, it kept breaking and I had to use a bit more twist just to keep it together! I'm really happy I didn't cave and spin two skeins, though, it is so big and squishy and feels like a real accomplishment! I measure about 8 WPI so an aran/bulky weight for sure, about 100 yards. 

My second project was a spontaneous decision coming off the high of finishing Flower Power - while it was drying I launched immediately into this project. The fiber here is BFL which Melissa kindly sent me because she knew I was practicing my drafting! She is the sweetest! Amazingly, despite the long staple length, this fiber was SO soft. Is there anything else you could want?? Every time I finished one of the little batts it felt like another mini project done - so fun! This was her "Hodgepodge Fiber Kit" which you can still find on her website, but I wouldn't wait! Her fiber is one of a kind and goes fast. 

This project was about 2 oz of fiber so I imagine it will be for something small, or as an accent to a bigger piece, and I spun it as a stand-alone single. I soaked it and attached a weight as it was drying to help set some of the extra twist I got in it, and am pretty happy with how I spun it!

One element I'm really still working on in my spinning is consistency. On some level, I love the charming thick and thin nature of handspun yarn, and my drafting is getting much more consistent, but I find that the longer I spin, the more the thickness of my singles increases as I go. I've been reading all sorts of spinning books recently and am hoping to pick up some tips on how to avoid this, any experience from readers would be much appreciated!

These are the only two projects in my Handspun section on Ravelry, but I have no doubt it's just going to grow from here. I've already ordered some new top - BFL and silk blend I am going to try to spin into some sock yarn - on request from a certain husband and crazy sock lover. ;)

Happy week!