Busy Bee

I've been kind of quiet lately because I've been up to my elbows in projects and/or work (mostly work) but that just means there are reports to be made and even a couple of photos to show.

As I mentioned before, I will be teaching a class on Amigurumi crochet during the Lincoln Land Needle in a Haystack event on January 15th (you can register online here).  I have to say, I'm really getting into this.  I showed you some project I did earlier here.  I thought I might use the little turtle as the class project but in the back of my mind I kept thinking I wanted to do a bee.  I couldn't really find a pattern I liked so today I did this:

He turned out to be a happy little bee and cute to boot!  I'm pretty sure this is going to be our project.

I also got a couple of project finished up.  On the link above, along with the animals, is a scarf I made from some wool I'd spun up.  I started a hat but ran out of yarn.  Fortunately, I had another braid of roving left to spin.  From all that I could see, both braids were the same but when I got into the second braid, I realized that the colors were much mudier than the first and it did not turn out nearly as well as the first batch.  I'm so glad I did them in the order I did.  But I did get the braid finished, and with it, the hat:

I love it more than I could have imagined.  This yarn softened up tremendously when it was washed and I'm ready for tomorrow morning going back to work.  I love the vintage, almost flapper look of the hat, too.  It was totally unintentional, though, I have to say!

And talking about finishing, remember the felted clogs? I finally got around to actually felting them and something happened that I've never had happen before.  First, the felt:

These are shown next to the same shoe as the other.  I never get tired of it!  But the unexpected thing was that one of the clogs felted much more than the other. You can see the one on the left is larger than the one on the right. I've put it though another felting which helped but it's still too large so another felting will be on the horizon.  I just have to be careful to not overdo it and get one that won't fit my feet!!