Cleaning things up!

I have a pretty large craft room. In fact, it used to be the formal living room. But it never got much use and everyone hangs out in the family room anyway. So a couple years ago, we put glass french doors in the doorways and it became my craft room. I really like having so much room to sew, knit, spin, even scrapbook now and then. But it's been neglected for months and it has become a dumping ground for stuff that doesn't have a home. Here's what it looked like this past Saturday morning.



Shameful, really. So I devoted my day to putting things in order.



Once most of the junk was off the floor, I decided I need to tackle the desk.


That took me longer than the mess that was all over the floor.



Now that the room is pretty picked up, I feel like I can be creative again. But I do have three baskets worth of mending and alterations to get through now. So many projects, so little time.

Rebooting

It's been a year since I've done any blogging of sorts. LiveJournal was giving me a headache so I'm starting over here. I may eventually copy all my old posts over here but not anytime soon.

So I may as well kick off my blog reboot with a bit of bragging. Sure, why not?

So last week, I dropped off my handspun knee-high socks at the local county fair and entered in the knitted garment from handspun category. Unfortunately, I was so busy all week, I didn't get a chance to attend the fair or even see my competition. I was able to make some time to pick up my socks on the last day. To my shock and delight, I saw that I'd won two ribbons!



Turns out that I won first place (blue ribbon) for the knitted garment from handspun yarn and champion (purple ribbon) in the fiber arts class. Needless to say there was much squeeing and dancing about when I realized what the results were. It was my first time submitting anything to the fair and it felt really wonderful to get that validation.

So...about the socks. The fiber is Blue Moon Fiber Arts' Sheep to Shoe kit. I'm pretty sure the colorway is Farmhouse but there was no label on the bag.



I spun it all up fairly thin on my drop spindle. And instead of plying three singles together as suggested in the directions, I chain-plied it to keep the color progressions together.





As soon as I'd made yarn, I started knitting it up before I'd even finished the spinning. Big mistake. Huge.



First of all, I wasn't really crazy about how the hell looked with the color change. Second of all, it was biasing big time. Since I had just started spinning I had not yet realized it was best to set the twist BEFORE knitting with your handspun yarn. So I ripped out all the knitting I had done and concentrated on finishing the spinning and plying. As is the case with many of my projects it went through various stages of completion and neglect. I started the spinning in 2007 and finally finished the socks in June of this year.

Once I picked up the socks again, I had decided to make the heels match each other and so used a long section of green for each short row heel.



The nature of a handspun yarn means that I would not have perfectly matched socks but I think I came as close as possible without too much additional manipulation.




All in all, I'm very proud of them. It is a darn shame that I finished them in June and it's going to be some time before it is cool enough to wear them. Of course, as soon as the temperature dips slightly, I'm bound to wear them ASAP.