I put the question mark there because I haven’t spun much at all. Remember the Fleece to Fair Isle? If you do, then you’re one step ahead of me. I have that one poor skein. And I did chart out the pattern for the main part of the sweater. Which has vague similarities to this. I say vague because mine is going to have skulls. Not like you couldn’t have figured that one out. So that’s where that stands. I’m bored with grey and I keep getting pretty colored fibers in the mail.

I belong to Hello Yarn’s club and this was the last one:

Lantern Festival Corriedale. I did a 2 ply. For half of a second I thought of predrafting it all in one piece so there were long color separations but I love the mix of colors. I decided to strip and predraft and I have this fun bright mixed up yarn. I’m not sure what it’s destined to be. It’s DK-worsted and possibly will be a sweater yoke at some point.

I also belong to Abby’s fiber batt club:
July

And August

I know I haven’t spun them yet. I can’t decide HOW I want to spin them. Well, the blues are going to be for my Mom so I suppose I should wait to find out how she wants me to spin them. The tan just arrived and I would have done it if I hadn’t been on to trying out the Heathers I’ve been producing:

Have you ever been so giddy and silly about a fiber that you start spinning without thinking. And you continue spinning feeling all giddy about the fiber and the color and the texture and the feel and the colors and and and….. And you end up with something that is underspun or overspun. Yeah, well, that’s where I am with this one. It’s a tad underspun and certainly not even. But it is pretty just the same:

I keep looking at the Reid Sweater that Amy finished and thinking a heathered yarn for the Baby Boogie would be really nice in that sweater.

Luckily that is my excuse to get another batt. Yes I know I can add more twist. Like I said, this is my excuse to buy another batt from myself. I just don’t know which colorway. These are a few that I’ve been working on:

You can’t see the heatherness in them all but they are all a nice varied heather color. Of course there are more to come.

There may still be lots of boxes:

But the fiber is finding a home. The shelf you see in the picture above is holding all the luxury fibers (each bin is a different one) and there are almost 30 flavors of fibers in large bins (those are 10-20 lbs of each):

And the wheels have a found a home. There is plenty of room to move around:

And you can see behind it, the carders and such. The spindles are still on display in the other room and will move in as soon as the wall behind where they will sit, is covered in peg board to hang fiber. In the next week or 2, I have all the looms arriving. I can’t wait to get them warped and displayed.

And to prove that I’m not JUST working on the shop, but working on it’s filling:
Twinkle batts. Single color batts with sparkle.

These are up for ordering on the Fiber Blend Page.

Ones that aren’t up yet are the new “Heathers”.

I’m going to try to have a ton of these done for the Vermont Sheep and Wool in a couple of weeks.

And because there was interest in seeing how “Jack” knit up:

Yes, I’m working on yarns and fibers in this. Sadly I don’t think I’ll have time to list it before I leave for Vermont but you can always order some from the Custom Yarns Page.

And now I need to leave to get the kids together and head over to the shop for the day.

ME: “What do you want for breakfast?”
Baby Boogie: “Peet-zee.”

Of course she would want Peet-zee. It’s her favorite food ever. And why shouldn’t it be. Pizza rocks! Pizza is so versatile that it could easily be something that most people can eat. You vary the crust and the toppings and you’re good to go.

Today I used a standard whole wheat crust.
1.5 cups whole wheat flour
.5 cups white flour
a dash of olive oil
warm water
a package of active yeast
1 tsp Honey

Mix the water, honey and yeast. Let sit for 15-30 minutes to start it activating. Mix in the rest of the ingredients. Roll out on a pan or pizza stone for the oven. I like to prebake my crust a bit so I put it in for 10 minutes in a 350F oven.

Breakfast “cheese”
4 oz silken tofu
.5 tsp Vanilla extract
Stevia or some other sweetener (sweeten to your liking)
Blend it all until smooth and incorporated. I find a blender is best because it makes it creamy.

Toppings:
Fruit. In my opinion, berries are the best. I use what is fresh on hand. I had blackberries and blueberries the other day when I made this.

All you need to do is spread the “cheese” on the crust, add the toppings and bake for 8-10 minutes. The “cheese” puffs a bit and helps capture the berries.

Slice and eat. yummy Peet-zee.

In KNITTING news
I finished the hat and mitten set for my niece:

And I cast on for my sweater in the new yarn.

I forgot to give you details the other day. It’s the Big Ball sweater yarn in worsted weight. The colorway is “Jack”. It was inspired by a stray cat that passed through here recently. I’ll get a photo of the sweater in progress soon. The sweater will be a freebie pattern given away with the purchase of the yarn - same as I did with the Chunky sweater yarn.

I have pictures of the shop and things that are going in it. I’ll try to get those in an entry as soon as I catch my breath. Mom is getting ready for a quilt show (a really big one) that she leaves for on Wednesday. I’ve been trying to help with a little folding and ironing. Tonight I’m putting together Felting sets for her to take.

What’s on the needles these days?

The Mittens that I were so obsessed with a couple of weeks ago have been sitting in the bag. I was obsessed with the spinning and casting on…. and now….. I’ve dumped the exquisite handspun fair mittens for gift knitting. .

I have a couple of visiting children (my niece and nephew to be exact). They just moved from California to Rhode Island (before California they lived in Hawaii). Needless to say, they are in need of winter gear. Any knitter’s first thought might be that these kids need mittens and hats.

For Mister K:

I had the hat almost done previously (and I have no idea what yarn it is, there was no ball band). I didn’t think I had enough of the white for the mittens so the hand part of the mittens were done with Paton’s Sheltand Chunky.

Miss M:

She also chose Paton’s Shetland Chunky in a blue tweed. The wrists are done in Paton’s Divine. I haven’t started her hat yet, as soon as the mittens are done, I’ll get to the hat.

Hopefully before the head home I’ll get it all done, but at least now I know what’s going to fit them. I made one other mitten in the grey Paton’s because I though Mister K would rather have all grey. Nope, he liked the other set. So once I finish the grey ones, I’ll send it on with them too so their Mom can use them or they’ll have a spare.

I also have a couple of sweaters going. One, amazingly, is an old WIP. Kepler. I almost ripped it because I just couldn’t decide what to do with it. Then Mom came over and slipped on the half finished sleeve. She liked it. Thus solving my other issue of wanting to make her a sweater but not liking the original pattern I had done with the worsted Big Ball yarn of mine. So I finished that sleeve, made the second one, and started the body (twice). The original body was calculated wrong and so I had to redo it with less stitches. It’s well on it’s way now though:

The second sweater hasn’t really gotten underway yet. Technically I suppose I can’t call it a WIP. I came up with a new colorway and I wrote the pattern over the past few days. I have the yarn balled, it’s sitting in a tote with the needles, but there isn’t a single stitch on the needles:

I’ll hopefully be casting on over the weekend.

Every now and then I read someone’s post about how they made a small mistake in lace or a cable or in something else on a sweater and they had to rip a bazillion rows to get back to where it was. I am so not willing to do that. I only drop the stitches I have to and work back up to where I was. It’s a common technique to do it this way. It’s not as hard as it sounds. So when I found a mistake in the lace on Baby Boogie’s sweater, I thought I’d show you how I fix these things.

My mistake is a missed yarn over in the pattern repeat several rows down:

I drop only the stitches I need to in order to get to the mistake. As in this lace, I have to drop more because of all the patterning. I decide to drop 9 stitches which is the whole lace insertion. I drop it down and pick up my 9 stitches with a set of DP’s that are the same size as my working needles.

This is the key part. I follow the patterning working the knit rows and then the purl rows as I would for the whole sweater. The only difference is that I’m knitting only one small insertion instead of the whole sweater. I knit back and forth in the patterning rows so I don’t get mixed up. Just make sure to use the right row of dropped yarn.

See the mistake has been fixed and now we’re just working up to where I was before I noticed the mistake.

Here the problem is all fixed:

You can’t tell there was a mistake, it blends right back in with the rest of the sweater.

And now I can move on to the other mistake I noticed:

Fixing mistakes really is as easy as all that. Just follow your patterning of knit and purl rows back up. Hopefully in the next few days I’ll find the time to block the sweater and buy some buttons. Tomorrow I’m updating the website so until that’s done, I don’t imagine I’ll be doing much else.