Gelukwensen!

Congratulations to wiscjennyann, who won the contest!

I am so glad that I decided to do a random drawing from the get-go, because it would have been awfully hard to choose my favorite contest entry from the bunch. You guys are a creative, ambitious group of people, and it was inspiring to read through your contest entries. Our lovely contest winner actually decided to write an entire blog post about her creative ambitions for the next year, and you all should read it. She writes very eloquently about why learning Dutch will be a creative process for her -- something which I really admire, because I've always found learning languages to be incredibly difficult. (And, uh, I hope the title of this post actually means "congratulations", and not something dirty or mean or weird. I'm trusting Yahoo Babelfish on this one...)





I have been working on two knitting projects as of late. Both of them are gifts. The first one is a Shetland Triangle (by Evelyn Clark), which is a birthday gift for a friend of my mom's. I'm knitting it on larger needles, in Reynolds Whiskey (a sportweight yarn), and it's going to be a beautiful and cozy fall and winter shawl.




I don't have photos of the actual knitting for my other project, but I do have photos of the handspun yarn:





The yarn is about a worsted weight, from a Blue Moon Fiber Arts Sheep 2 Shoe Kit. It's superwash merino, and chain (Navajo) plied. I don't have exact yardage or wpi counts, because I was in a hurry to cast on, and didn't bother. But I'm very happy with the yarn, and only used half of the kit, which means I have more of this lovely fiber to work with! (For the record, this kit was over weight. I'm guessing that my first kit being under weight was a fluke. And again, the fiber is really lovely, comes relatively uncompacted compared to other merino top I've bought, and in my experience so far is very color fast. I really love these kits.)

I'm about halfway done knitting a pair of legwarmers for an almost 4 year old little girl. She's the kind of little kid who I think would happily make such a fashion statement, and I can't wait to see photos of her in them. The legwarmers are very simple -- 2x2 ribbed tubes. They should be small enough to stay on her right now, but will definitely grow as she does. I tried the first one on, and while it's obviously short for my leg, it stretches to fit my calf. Talk about flexible sizing! I'm sure there will be modeled photos when she gets them, and I'll make sure to link to them for you. But more on this project when it's done.


I suppose that's all for now. I'm not sure if it will be in the next blog post or not, but I have been delving into fiber processing, and hope to write a blog post (or ten) about that. It will all be from a beginner's perspective, because I only got my hand carders this summer, and have yet to even receive my combs. But let me know if you have any questions, and I'll either try to answer them, or find links to answers. There are tons of great resources out there on the internet, and between blogs and youtube videos, I feel that I've received a pretty good beginner's education in how to use all of these funny looking tools.


time to knit...