Tuesday, March 1, 2011

It's been awhile.

Sorry it's been so long since I have posted anything. I've been busy (and lazy). I found a local yarn shop that sells spinning wool, which has given me no end of joy. This is just the first of many purchases to come.  It's a beautiful blue Suri Alpaca. This is such a gorgeous color, this picture does it little justice.

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I heard that alpaca is slippery stuff to spin, but I have found that I actually like it more than the wool I just finished. I taught myself, (after lots of cursing) the long draw technique. It's so much fun, now that I know how to do it! I'm still very inconsistent, I find that I draw it waaayy too far out, and the single just snaps into nothingness, but I will keep practicing.

I've also been doing some dyeing. The last bit of my Polwarth wool I wanted to do something fun with, so I decided to knit up a pair of thrummed mittens for my MIL. I didn't want to use boring white, so I dyed it. Unfortunately, it did not come out as it looks in the first pictures, (most of the color mixed together once I put the heat to it), but I'm happy with the results. 





Isn't it a pretty fuchsia color? 

 This is the finished wool that I dyed. I know it's looks like it's all gold, but in actuality it has pinks, and greens running through it. It looks great with the fuchsia yarn. I'm still getting used to dyeing with heat, I get a little better each time.


I've also been thinking about joining the Weavers Guild of Saint Louis. I'm apprehensive, I'm not a social butterfly, I want to learn as much as I can, but it's hard to make that leap to join a group. I wonder if any of my readers are a part of a guild (knitting, artists, weavers etc)? What do you do? What have you learned from being apart of a guild? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

I wish I had taken a moment to take pictures of the finished mittens, but I was so excited to send them off that I forgot! So that's what I've been doing lately, along with working, and wishing for Spring. Will it ever come?

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