Hello friends! This place has gotten a little dusty over the past year. After battling cancer and being given a clean bill of health in the spring I jumped off the couch and started living again and it has been one adventure after another every since.

I stepped away from here with every intention of coming back, it just took a little longer then I expected. I have missed keeping track of my current projects and my kids antics and so here I am again......no looking back just moving forward! I can not wait to catch up on what everyone is doing!

I hope everyone had a truly blessed Christmas. We ended up with a horrible upper respiratory thing that started on Christmas Eve and is still lingering. So Christmas was a little quieter then usual but that was fine. Lots of game playing and couch cuddling that is still continuing today. And knitting did I mention there was some knitting?


 I have been going through a period where I am not enjoying much of what is on my needles. I have lots of socks that need heels and a shawl this is almost complete. Is anyone else feeling blah about their knitting? I chose to ignore my WIP basket this weekend and picked up my Shakleton Project. IF you would like to read about this Epic adventure you can finds out more here. Sarah from Fibertrek TV is the vision behind this project. I am knitting a fair isle vest that requires steeking......that is going to be my epic adventure. Having never steeked before I am excited to learn this new technique. So I managed to get all of the body knit and I have just separated for the arm holes and am starting the colorwork. I am getting excited about my knitting again!




I did get a spin in before we all got sick. The braid from Threewatersfarm was of polwarth and silk and was a really lovely spin. The color was perfect for the week of Christmas and I am calling it Shiny and Bright!!



There has been some weaving. We somehow ended up with 2 riggid heddle looms....yes 2. Christopher is weaving right alongside me. These are so much easier to warp then the floor loom and portable as well. I have some cotton for kitchen towels on my loom and Chris is making his Dad a scarf.

I have been thinking about my crafting goals for 2016. Thinking is about as far as I have gotten. I need to make some decisions about those projects lingering in the WIP basket and I am thinking about jumping into some SAL/ KAL's to get me excited about my knitting again. Being in community is always more fun then going it alone!




I do want to share one of my most favorite knits from this year. I just got my Josephine Shawl back from my LYS where it has been on display. You can see all my project notes here. I love this shawl and am glad to have it back so I can wear it!

So hoping your New Year is blessed and filled with fibery delights! I'm excited to see what the 2016 will bring!!

Joining Ginny over at Smallthings for the Yarn Along

The warmer weather was here......and now it's gone hiding. the past few days have been cold and rainy, the temp is only 48 degrees as I sit to write this morning. It is June right?

Life got busy again and I have missed the last 2 weeks. My Mom has been very ill and has been living with us for the past 2 months. Lot's of adjustments to life here and plans for what will happen in the future are all going on. After 6 months of myself being so ill it feels like life will never be normal again. I guess we are trying to get used to the new normal.

The kids have all been so busy and most of it related to animals of some kind. We have a new kitten that Elaina brought home and the chickens are all getting so big. Emily is off in Canada riding for the month of June. Elaina has been taking Hannah Grace to ride on her horse Cash. I love seeing her pass on her passion to her younger sister! Hannah Grace loves watching her sister ride and especially jump. She keeps telling me that she will be jumping horses soon.....hmmm....we will see about that!


Between my Moms hospital stays and doctor visits I have been getting some knitting done. I finished the sock blank socks. These were fun and I will be knitting more in the future.


I also cast on for a Hitofude. Finally! I have been wanting to do this ever since Karen over at Pumpkin Sunrise knit hers. What an enjoyable knit and pretty fast too! I only have 2 more charts on the body to finish. This one will be a gift but I know I want to make one for myself as well! Such a clever construction!


There has been spinning and I am still washing fleece. I did a post the other day on how I am processing my fleece if you are interested in that you can find it here I will be doing another post this week on hand combing. I am really enjoying my hand combs and love the way it makes fluffy clouds out of the fiber.

Junes glow colorway on BFL handspun

I also brought home a new fiber toy this week. It is my son Christopher's fault....yes we will blame it all on him.  He has been weaving on a small wooden loom and really enjoying it. While at Maryland Sheep and Wool he was able to sit at a floor loom and actually weave on it. He got up and told me he really wanted a floor loom. I smiled and thought ok maybe sometime in the way future.....where in the world would I put that!!  I love that my 11 year old son has a passion for fiber like I do! He has been my tag along at every fiber festival this year! I told this story to a dear friend who proceeded to tell me she had a floor loom she needed to find a home for. And so this past week we brought home our new addition. (and it was amazing how easily it found a spot in our family room!) So we are now learning all about weaving and are hoping to be warping next week! Do you weave? If you have any great tips or articles or videos to help us I would love for you to share! We signed up for a Craftsy class on weaving and I know a few of my spinning guild members are amazing weavers and we can get help from them if we need it.

Nilus Leclerc loom

I have not been reading a lot lately but the kids and I are planning our summer read alouds. One we will start with is Swallows and Amazons. We read this series when my oldest were young and fell in love with it. I am looking forward to sharing it with our younger ones now.

Joining Ginny for todays Yarn Along! Happy knitting everyone!!

I've been spinning for over 2 years now and have been wanting to process my own fleece for a while. I guess it was a natural progression and the next rabbit hole to go down in my fibery pursuits. I searched the web and read many accounts of how others wash their fleeces, I talked to my fellow guild members and they shared their opinions and I also watched some youtube videos  and all of these thing were very helpful. So I gathered some supplies and just decided to go for it.



I had purchased 1 lb of corriedale from a seller on etsy a few months ago. It was washed and the pictures showed an amazing color. When I received the fiber it was washed but still had a lot of lanolin in it and so I decided to wash it again. It was a coated fleece and had no VM (vegetable matter) at all but I did not want to spin in the grease so more washing was necessary.

locks aligned and ready to wash

With this fleece I decided I wanted to preserve the lock structure for easier combing. I began making piles of locks all aligned with the tips pointing the same way.

I then placed these locks in neat piles inside mesh laundry bags. I filled a large plastic tub with hot tap water. Our tap water gets really hot and so I did not need to boil water to get it above 120 degrees. I squirted Dawn dish soap into the water about 1/3 cup and then placed my mesh bags into the water. I left this to soak for 25 minutes (approx. as I got distracted with other projects a few times)

soaking

After 25 minutes I took the bags out and gently squeezed the soapy water out of them. I then placed them into another tub of hot water to rinse. Another 25 minutes went by and then I repeated this procedure with another rinse soak.

When they were rinsed well I laid the bags on a towel and rolled them up to gently squeeze the water out of them.

I then pulled out my locks and laid them on wire shelves to dry in the sun. It was very breezy and they dried really fast.

A couple notes......water temp is important and must be kept high to melt the lanolin. It also must be kept constant or the cooler water will make the lanolin hard again and very difficult to get out. I only needed one wash with this fleece as it was already pretty clean....other fleeces might need more. Do not agitate the fiber in the water or it can felt.

washed locks

One benefit of working with a raw fleece are super soft hands from the lanolin!

I enjoyed this process a lot. I am really happy with the resulting fiber and can  not wait to process it. I will have another post on combing and spinning it.

It has been a fibery week indeed! I have been knee deep in processing my first fleece and test washing some fiber from another 2 fleeces! This is my first time and I plan on doing a blog post on the whole process later this week. Everyone has their own way of doing it and I am trying to find mine as I glean wisdom from those that have gone before!

Corriedale

Knitting has been in the back ground but I am making progress on my socks that I shared last week and I also decided to pick up the pace on my Josephine Shawl. I really want to be able to wear this now. So I'm trying for 5 lace repeats a day.....then it will be mindless stockinette for a while. I have a back log of things I need .....(want).... to cast on for but I am trying to restrain myself till I get this done.


The past weekend we deemed "Mothers Day" weekend! I started enjoying my weekend on Friday with our monthly Guild Meeting. We had around 35 people attend this months meeting and it was great to see so many familiar and new faces. We spent the day doing nothing but talking fiber and doing fibery things. There is nothing bad about that!


Then Saturday Emily and I headed to the "Studio" to spin and mentor others wanting to learn. I was able to get this months club from Three Waters Farm on the wheel and decided to do a navajo ply to keep those colors true. The fiber is targhee and it was my first time spinning it. I finished it up on Sunday and the colorway "Spring in my Heart" has truly stolen my heart! Not sure what it will be yet but am enjoying just petting it for now!




I hope everyone enjoyed their Mothers Day as much as I did mine! I woke up to breakfast and all sorts of wonderful gifts! My most favorite is a gorgeous necklace my children gave me! It has all their names and birthstones and I just love it! I am a very blessed Mama!


I will leave you with a photo of our newest addition.....a sweet girl named Chandler! Life is full of surprises and she is a happy one!

It's a rainy day here in the woods and it looks like the perfect day to sip tea and spin for a while. I feel like we are still recovering from our fibery weekend at Maryland Sheep and Wool. I wrote a post on our adventure here if you are interested in seeing lots of sheep and wooly things!


This weeks knitting has been mainly working on  my sock blank socks. After seeing Susan B Andersons sock blanks I thought they looked like fun and I headed over to Gale's Arts and got one for myself. They are such a fun knit and I love thy way they are turning out! I am just making plain vanilla socks and I'm  about to turn the heel. My favorite heel these days is the OMG.....it really fits my foot perfectly.



I have been spinning this week and am just about ready to ply some gorgeous alpaca that I got from Upstream Alpacas. It's called Winter Day and it's 100% Baby Alpaca. It is the softest fiber and like spinning little clouds. I am spinning it on my CPW and enjoying every minute!

I had quite a surprise this week as I was interviewed for an article on guilds for a local magazine. I am calling this my 5 seconds of fame! They did spell my last name wrong and got a few other facts wonky but for the most part they captured how I feel about my fiber addiction. It was my first time out to the guild since ending chemo and a fun way to jump back in! You can find the article and photos online here.....Dirt Mag

I have not done much reading lately but hope to find something this week to delve into. Probably another audio book that will allow me to knit or spin while I listen. Looking forward to joining Ginny in the yarn along today and seeing what everyone is up too! Happy knitting!

We headed out on Friday after deciding last minute to spend the weekend in Maryland attending the Sheep and Wool festival. I've been to Rhinebeck for the last 3  years but this was our first time at Maryland. I had 2 fellow fiber lovers with me.....Christopher and Hannah Grace were just as excited as I was to meet some new fibery friends!




The weekend was simply gorgeous.....the weather was perfect and the Festival was amazing! Our plan was to get what was on our list on Saturday and then on Sunday just wander and enjoy with out any agenda.

First up was the fleece sale. I wanted a cormo and stood in line with some wonderful people as waited for the sale to start and chatted about fleeces. I love fiber festivals......everyone you meet is friendly and loves to talk fiber! Nothing can be bad about that!! After wandering through the piles of fleeces I found one that spoke to me and ended up with a lovely cormo cross. Saw some famous faces in the sea of others looking at fleeces and nearly took out Laura from "The knitgirlls" with my stroller!  I can not wait to start processing this one! I will be documenting it on the blog here as I learn the in's and out's of processing. And please if you have any great sources that you love pass them along! I'm so looking forward to the experience!

fleece sale

my cormo cross

this was our favorite sheep.....we kept coming back to him. He loved being petted!

rainbow sheep are the best

weaving a bookmark

We meandered through quite a few sheep barns meeting fibery friends as we went. And then headed over to the Family Activities tent for Christopher to take a class and make a tapestry book mark. While he was busy there Hannah Grace and I hit Solitude Wool and bought some squishy corriedale wool yarn for a future fair isle sweater vest I want to make. I can not say how much I love this company! All fiber is grown and processed in the US. I also snatched a bag of tunis fiber to spin. I was really trying to find fibers I have not worked with before for spinning. Clun Forest  was on my list! I also let Hannah Grace pick out some yarn for a new hat and mittens. She got a skein of mulitcolored Tunis! The lady at the booth was so informative and we talked spinning for a while and she offered me a bit of a Karakul fleece that she had purchased for a sample spin. What a sweet lady and so generous to offer me a way to try a breed I never even heard of before.









We watched the border collies  and their amazing herding skills for a while. After while we were just resting I got to meet an instagram friend! I only know her through instagram and knew she would be there and told her to look for Hannah Grace's wild hair......and that is exactly how she found me! She saw Hannah Grace peeking through the fence watching the dogs! We sat and chatted like old friends and it was so neat to meet her in real life!!

Hannah Grace had a captive audience and entertained the sheep with her drawings of them and some stories as well.

Sunday was another perfect day! Christopher had another class, this one was needle felting and he made a sea horse! He really liked this class. He also got a chance to sit at a floor loom and learn how to use it. He told me he really wants a floor loom now.....hmmmmm.....another fiber craft to delve into! We watched some of the show judging today and saw some more bunnies.




 Christopher picked out these buttons from Jenny the Potter for my fair isle sweater I will be making. I think he did a good job! I also hit into the whirled for a braid of Rambouillet......keeping with my plan of wanting breeds I have not spun. Another must have was a bag of battlings from Hobbledehoy fiber! I did also find a cute mini Turkish spindle for Emily.


We were able to cheer on some friends from our fiber guild as they competed in the sheep to shawl event. They ended up taking a third place and won the spinning award so that was exciting!


We really enjoyed the weekend and I can see this becoming a yearly event for us! Now to go rest and decide what to dive into first!