Selbu the third time

I've knitted it the thrid time...and I think this one is not the last.Not long after I finished mine, I went to a knitting meeting, where Adel fell in love with it. She was fondling it, trying it on, turning it inside out and back.

 I was so moved that even though I really don't like to knit for others I offered to make one for her.

She bought dark grey and dark red Lana Grossa sock yarn for it. I used one ball from each (there was a bit of leftover from the red, almost none from the grey).

With stranded knitting like this (colorwoek, where one holds the unused colorstrand behind the work) a throughout blocking is just as important as with lace. Look, before this one was looking much like an upruned potty, than a beret, some stitches are uneven,the whole thing is just puckering everywhere.

After finishing the knitting I soaked it in warm water, made sure with a rubberband that the ribbing would not grow, and put it over the biggest potlid I could find in my kitchen. It had a 28-30 cm diameter.

After letting it dry throughly i packed it and mailed the same day, no chance to make a modelled shot. From the letter I received after delivery I take the owner liked it well enough.:-) So it was worth it. Not to mention the yarn I got in exchange. I think I got the better end of the deal.

Spinning circle-again

I went to a spinning circle again. teh quality of our machines were considerably better this time as beside th eold, antique pieces there were new beauties too. My little bug was in a good company too

It was good to see familiar faces...

And I was glad to see new ones.

I was especially happy to see that there was interest not only in the wheels, but in spinning with drop spindles  too.

Thank you to the organizators, I hope we can meet again soon...

No sleep

Guess, why I didn't sleep last night!

Thank god for the practice with Ikea... Or inheriting some genes from my father.

Just because it is important...Chris found the bug :-)

Now I just have to figure out how am I going to put it under my pillow...

Sorry for not saying too much. I am knackered. I'll talk a bit more in a couple of days, OK?

Dying

To ease the pain of waiting for my wheel, I was dying up some wool.
This one with straberry, melon and blueberry colored drink powder.

This with orange, mango and black cherry...

And this with professional acit dye.

Helm's deep from handspun

I think I could call this a long term project because I started it a year ago by spinning some natural colored pure alpacca,  When I bought the fiber I had nothing particular in mind, but pretty soon decided it will become the Helm's deep shawl. I finished the yarn in july and it was resting on my bookshelf ever since...

Until I hit a wall with my current projects, everything is in a point where some calculation, decision is needed, and I am stuck with them... so I took the easy way out and cast on for a shawl...

It looked like this before blocking... just can't resist taking before and after pictures with lace, I am always amazed how lace changes...

The shawl design is using two different stitch pattern, One of them is Cloister. I am not a fan of bobbles and nupps, but I like how these came out.Maybe because there is not much of them there.

The other is moorish lattice.

The shawl is knitted in two pieces and grafted.

200 gramms of Alpacca, that became about 700 meters of two ply yarn, which has a nice soft halo.

I knitted the medium size, which is big enough to wrap myself in it, but light enough to scrunch it up as a scarf.

I like it so much, that i can even forget the incident of Christopher falling on my favourite Brittany needle breaking it into two...especially because with that I found out that one of my best liked resource ships to Hungary again.

Now I have to knit a pair natural colored mittens...Should this be my biggest problem. :-)

Preparing

For the time, when my own spinning wheel is arriving (which shouldn't be too long, if everything goes well).

In the meanwhile, to ease the waiting, I am preparing some stuff to spin later.

This one also started in the fall spinning day, where we also dyed some merino to purple with Rita. The hot water dye-bath roughed the wool up, it would have been pretty hard to spin it. No wonder I got my eyes shiny, when I found out that a drumcarder took up temporary residence with Zsu.

But then why stop with simple carding, as I had a handful of white angora, and always loved heathery and tweedy stuff, pulled some of it in in stripes. The result is soft, light and fluffy as a cloud.

I was so satisfied with the result, that right away dug out the bag that contained lotsa different fibers in shades of blue and turqoise.There was erino, mohair locks, lama, and who knows what it it, and I threw the last bunch of angora in it for good measure.

After this I was metodically preparing for the next time. I dyed a 8-900 gramms of merino with Colombus to indigo blue. About the same amount of alpacca with Kool Aid. The result was lighter than I expected, I think it could be called "Aqua".

And then added some really bright turqoise angora, and some blue angelina, just to have a bit shine.

Lastly I used up a bunch of stuff I bought before I knew what I was doing...Started of two bags of loose merino and seacell fibers. One of them was dark purple, the other is navy blue. We added some lilac colored merino, and a bit of orange. Then just a tiny bit of sun yellow, just for the fun of it.(This last one was a second hand shop find years ago... I never say fiber there before or after)

I always loved those colored batts on Etsy-n... now I have my own row, sitting at the back of my living room sofa...like birds on the electric cable.

Carnival time

One of the cable-channels is rerunning Lois and Clark episodes from the nineties.I used to watch them in Miami, I liked them and I learned a lot of English from them. So it was mainly nostalgie I let Christopher watch it when I bumped in them when we were home, because of his throat infection.

The result? Of course he wanted to be Superman in the school's carnival. First I didn't worried, every second hand shop was full with customes, every one of them had two or three Superman in different sizes... Until the minute my boy announced what is want to be dressed up.In that minute they dissapeared without a trace, even though I went at least fifteen different shop. So what a mommy can do? Start new rounds, this time in fabric shops. I went to at least six different shops, at the end I found teh three colors in three different places. Compared to getting the material, cutting and sewing wasn't such a big deal.

Except for the fact that Google pictures only show Superman from the front, and we only realized the day before the big one watching at the actually running episode, that there is also an S at the back of the cape. So at ten PM get the scissors and the leftover yellow fabric out and do some applique:

This one was made for the daughter of my friend, Timea. They don't have competition (what a great idea, kids can just enjoy themselves), but a theme every year. This year it was The Jungle. Since her little friend (umm...love:-)) wanted to be Tarzan, she wanted to be his Jane. My friend found some ocelot patterned fabric, and we came up with this:

Rosamund in purple

You've might seen this already on the picture from the woolday.
The pattern is Rosamunsd's cardigan, from the 2009 fall issue of interweave knitting.

Yarn is Lana Grossa, Royarl tweed, which my friend Regula brough me from Vienna. I used 400 gramms to the last meter.

The only change is, instead of buttons I used hooks and ....whatever you call those things. And of course added a few extra decrease and increase for waist-shaping.

This was the thing I started on january first, and took only a few days to complete it.

Playing with spinning

I keep spinning with my drop spindle, but since it still takes a really long time to spin enough yarn for a good sized lace, sometimes I get really bored, even if as with knitting, I have more than one project on the go at any given time...When I do, get bored that is, I am playing with small amounts of wool.

This, for example started at the Spinning day at the fall, when, with Melinda we carded toogether many colors that were kinda unlikely to go well toogether...I spun it later and got this tiny skein.

This also started out at the fall spinning day, where we received a raw fleece from Rita, which we had to wash and card...(I could only do the carding there). We've dyed it there to purple, which roughed up the fibers, it would have been pretty hard. So I carded it again, this time with hand carders, i added some streaks of white merino. The result is decidedly rustic...

And here is my current little darling.We got these colorful wools from Adrienn on the day of the wool, which I wanted to spin in a way that keeps the colors toogether, so the final yarn would stripe up when knitted. I spun it to my usual thickness (for which my friend Zsu dubbed me Spider-woman), but this time I wasn't making two ply, but three ply with the navajo plying technique.

This one is not much either, less than 30 gramms, but there is 100-120 meters of it.

What else one can do with it, but put it on the edge of the bookshelf and look at it???

White lion

As you might gathered I haven't done much knitting lately...I do have several project on the needles, some of them even have deadlines, but they are stuck usually at a point where some decision, calculation needed...
Until I drag myself out of the hole I show you something I finished at the very beginning of the year.
It is my second version of the lion-neck cardigan

I loved the first one, so much I wanted in in other color(s) too...

Yarn is merino/cashemere boucle from ICE yarns, slightly less than 400gramms.

Sorry about the pics..the lights does not want to cooperate...