Ode to My Mittens

Oh, Mittens, so warm and snug
Who, though not as I thought I wanted,
Have proved your worth.

Oh, Mittens, knit from the yarn
Spun from the wool
On my spindle so fair and so true.

Yarn that betrayed me by
Running when washed only
After the stitches all had been made.

I was ready to send you
To the closet that would have
Been a sentence of invisibility.

Oh, Mittens, who hold back
The wind and the cold
No matter how cold and how strong.

No matter if snow must be shoveled
Or windscreen scraped clean
Nothing can penetrate you.

I sing your worth and your strength
And your warmth.
Thank you, faithful Mittens.
Surprising Mittens.
Worthy Mittens.

Clean Up and Go

The weekend was good.  Really good.  Of course, it's now snowing and I just watched the snow plow dump about 2 feet of snow right in front of my car.  But the weekend was good.

I managed to get my craft room organized.  It will probably never happen again but I can always say it happened once.  All of my spinning fiber is organized.  All of the silks are in the same bin, all the merino in another, all of the cotton in another.  The same for my yarns.  All my lace yarn is in one drawer, all of my sock yarn in its own bin and so on.  I found yarn that I have no memory whatsoever of having purchased.  Don't know if that's because it was purchased so long ago or because I was in a wool stupor at the time of purchase.  Six of one...

One of the other benefits of the exercise is that I found 4 different projects that I'd started and abandoned.  I loved all of them so I have no idea why they got abandoned but they're out now and moving on.  I'll get photos of them in the next few days but what I want to show you now is my latest weaving project because it's been such a surprise. 

My idea was to use some self-striping yarn and see what it would do.  I had this Fortissima sock yarn that had cotton, wool and nylon in it.  I didn't like it for sock yarn but I really liked the colors in it.  I also decided that I would use some Trekking XXL with similar colors as stripes to go with the Fortissima.  The Trekking XXL goes from white to turqoise in really long stripes and it just adds a bit of structure to the colors in the main yarn.  You can really see it in the warp but it does show up in the weaving.  I love the sort of broken tartan look to it because of the really long repeats of color in the main yarn.  The plan is to use this for a bag.  My plan is to use swatch to the left as the strap.

This is only my second project so I'm still learning about what will work but the result has been so fun to watch. 

I even managed to get one project finished this weekend (I was a busy little beaver, like I said).  If you've got any interest in learning to do bobbin lace, I've found an excellent book called Beginner's Guide to Bobbin Lace by Gillian Dye and Adrienne Thunder.  Gillian and Adrienne are a couple of British ladies with mad bobbin skills and a modern outlook.  I've got my patterns all prepped for the practice projects and I've started working through them.  One of the patterns is for a torchon lace bookmark that looks like this:

Isn't that pretty?  Their sample was done with 2 different shades of blue, which I didn't have.  So I did mine with a cream and light blue which was a good combination I think.  They've got some great tips and some interesting patterns like one for a little purse and one for a scarf using art yarn.