Still here

Life goes on, right?  That's all I'm saying.

Tuesday night I did my first program on bobbin lace making.  The Prairie Weavers group asked me to give an overview of bobbin lace history and I thought I'd do a little practical hands-on as well.  I love doing programs for this group, they're always so involved in the programs and ask great questions.  I had a look at the tools for lace making like the various pillows and types of bobbins and then the types of lace made all over the world.

While I was preparing for the program, I thought I would do this little bookmark pattern as a sample.

When I was at the Vogue Knitting event in Chicago last month, I visited the Habu booth because I thought I might find some interesting yarn to use for bobbin lace.  I came away with a silk/stainless steel and a linen/stainless steel and a 100% ramie yarn.  With lace, you need a yarn/thread that will have some structure to it, which is why linen thread is so often used.

I tried the linen/stainless steel but it didn't work.  Too rough. But then I did this pattern with the silk/stainless steel and I LOVED it!  It's going to work great!

Golly

I hadn't realized it's been so long away. Work has absorbed all my energy the last 2 week and I've done absolutely nothing else. I feel bad that I haven't been able to meet some knitting deadlines but the biggest part of the rush is over now and I should be able to get to things. The only thing I did manage to finish is my linen Roman Stripe Stole with the beads on the edgings. It's been the first really hot period here but I've so fallen in love with it that I've put it on and worn it around the house for as long as I can stand it at a time!

I ripped out the Pi Shawl with the Habu wool/stainless steel yarn because it was just too unmanageable in that format. I've restarted what I originally thought would be a scarf but has now morphed into a shrug. I should have enough to do the wrist to wrist part with this yarn (I have 2 cones (about 275 yards each) and then I have a plum colored merino Habu yarn that's the same impossibly small weight that I think will work fine if I decide I want to make it into a cardigan, which I'm really liking the thought of. I think I would make it a pretty frilly long edging. We'll see how it goes. I'm starting to get used to working with it but it's not something you can speed along with.

This weekend I'm enjoying working a bit on it while I'm watching the dvd of Season 1 of Burn Notice. I really enjoy the smart aleck humor of the show - very much my sense of humor. In fact I'm a little shocked that it was picked up for a second season. Usually my seal of approval doubles as a seal of doom for shows!

Life is like that

I’m a pretty intuitive sort of person. I trust my feelings (not my emotions but feelings I get about things – emotions aren't completely untrustworthy), I usually follow my hunches and I know that when my inside voice is telling me to pay attention to something and I tell it to shove off, I’m usually going to pay for it. Something like that just happened to me while I was felting my backpack. Here’s the unfelted version:

Here, however, is the felted the liver out of it version. Hummm… I like the shape and I think I’ll go ahead and write up the pattern but I’m a bit disappointed that I sat and let it get to this point. But felting is lot like life – there’s no going back.

Now that I’ve had my Forrest Gump moment, we move on.

Here’s the Roman Stripe Stole I’ve been making as a craft for the read along in my Ravelry Shakespeare group – we’re reading Antony and Cleopatra. The pattern is really fun but you really have to pay attention and keep your wits about you. I’m using Louet Euroflax Paris in Willow. It’s 100% Wet Spun Long Linen and for weavers among us is 14/2. For the non-weavers among us, it’s a lace weight and Willow is a sort of olive green.



And here’s the Pi Shawl using the Habu stainless steel wool yarn. This is being so interesting and really quite challenging. Most of the challenge has to do with the size of the yarn. This photo shows the start of the shawl with the sample of the Euroflax on one side and a light worsted weight yarn on the other just to show the scale of how small this yarn really is.

Take me out to the ballgame...

St Louis has some wonderful yarn shops. Multiple wonderful yarn shops. Yesterday was Stitch and Pitch day at the St Louis Cardinals baseball game so several of us took the day to shop, knit and watch baseball. It was my first trip to a major league game and, although it wasn’t what I expected, I still enjoyed it a lot. It brought back some lovely memories of all the hours I spent with my grandfather watching Atlanta Braves baseball when I was in high school. We watched every game that we could and I loved that time spent with him. It reminded me how much I enjoy baseball.



Of course, the biggest event of the day was the shopping! And shopping means yarn shops. Kirkwood Knittery and Knitorious were the main stops on the tours and we all were all pretty good because both shops did have stock remaining after we left. Both of them. How’s that for being good!

My main purchases were at Kirkwood where I got 3 types of yarn that I’ve been anxious to try since last August when I saw them at Stitches. They’re all 3 from Habu, a Japanese yarn manufacturer with the most unique yarns imaginable. All 3 yarns are ultra thin – almost like thread – small thread. One of them is silk, one merino and one wool stainless steel! Yes, the yarn is actually made from 75% wool and 25% stainless steel. They also have paper yarns and copper yarns and all sorts of other weird and wonderful things. I’ve got a few ideas on what I’m going to do with them so watch this space.

Here’s view of the Habu wool stainless steel, the size 10 crochet cotton, lace weight yarn and fingering weight yarn just to give you an idea of scale.