I've only been knitting for about 2 1/2 years now and I've become quite obsess with this little hobby. A little hobby that has finally turned into a big, expensive, running-out-of-room passion of mine now. For Christmas my wonderful hubby order a spinning wheel for me since I have been learning to make my own yarn for my knitting projects. I've been using a basic drop spindle given to me from my knitting buddy Carey Sweeten (This was part of her evil plan to suck me into the world of spinning fiber so that she would have someone to dye fibers with.) and although I'm quite slow in this process, I've still managed to produce a couple of projects from my ever growing fiber collection. Currently I am about a 1/3 of the way through 1 oz. of a silk hankie with no clue on what to do with. I'll probably just spin it all up put it on an empty bobbin and just say "Ooo...it's silk, how exotic". Spinning silk isn't all that hard to do, it hardly needs any twist on it from the draft but it's not all that fun to work with. Very long fibers that stick to everything and if there is any air movement in the room you can pretty much count on those long fibers making their way up your nose.
As for my knitting, I just finished two hats and currently working on mittens to go with the red hat. The green hat was a basic pattern using worsted weight yarn that I made myself. I picked up 16 oz. of a carded wool in a greenish/olive color, spun up on my 2 oz. spindle and finished up with a 2 ply for the yarn.
The red hat is the "An Unoriginal Hat" hat pattern by Stephanie Pearl McPhee, done in Mauch Chunky strawberry red yarn. Originally I had gotten enough yarn to make a basic hat but discover while knitting that I didn't like how it was knitting up. The yarn is a single type of yarn and when knitting at the gauge it felt pretty flimsy and weak, not what I was wanting in a thick, warm hat for winter. So I grab the second skien and knitted with 2 strands thus producing the thick, warm hat look I was going for. Unfortunately this used up my 2 skeins and I ran out before finishing the project. A quick web search and week later I now have 3 skeins now with plenty to make some mittens. The patter for the mittens is "The Basic Cable Mitten" by Amy O'Dell. The mittens knit up pretty quick, I've got the right one done, will start on lefty later tonight.
As I finished the hat up over the holiday weekend, my hubby commented on if I was making the hat for a giant since it looked rather large. "Noooo", I replied back, "it's a thick, warm hat for winter." I didn't see myself complaining about having cold ears last Saturday when we had some snow and lots of cold wind.Well that's the end of the first blog entry and if anyone is wondering about the name of the blog well...James is a very patience man and is still waiting for some socks.
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