Monday, July 21, 2008

Stash Enhancement

The darling husband and I had a lovely weekend with his parents at the Midwest Fiber & Folk Festival. My previous fiber festival experience consists of two trips to Maryland Sheep & Wool and while this festival was no where near the size of Maryland, it was delightful just the same.

I am going to be completely shameless with this post and try to distract you from the lack of new knitting or spinning content with pictures of what I bought this weekend.

The first purchase of the day went to Frontier Fiber Mill, husband and wife alpaca venture in Indiana where they not only raise the alpacas but run their own mill. The quality of the fiber was superb and I cannot wait to start spinning. (The yarn looked lovely also but I was too captivated by the roving to venture much to that side of the booth). I liked their wares so much that I got about 6oz destined to be a scarf for the darling husband:



And another 3+oz for me!



Then I made my way over to the Briar Rose booth, which I have been looking forward to for months ever since seeing the beautiful dye jobs featured on Knitspot. After displaying an impressive showing of self restraint, since the entire booth was to die for, I came away with this skein of alpaca laceweight, destined to be a Frost Flowers and Leaves shawl (Ravelry link).



Next comes just over a pound of 80/20 Coopworth/Silk roving from a lovely farm whose name I cannot remember, destined to be a February Lady Sweater.



Last, but certainly not least, I stopped by the Knitting Notions booth. Actually, this was the first booth that I looked at on Saturday but every color and yarn was just too beautiful to take in all at once and I knew that for the sake of my bank account I would have to look a couple of times to prevent purchasing the entire inventory on impulse. After my second trip back to the booth, I came away with three skeins of laceweight for a Wing o' the Moth shawl (Ravelry link) and some sock yarn for the next pair of husband socks.





That's all I've got for tonight. I'm almost done with a Tangled Yoke Cardigan (Ravelry link) - I just need to graft the underarms, weave in some ends, and find buttons. Hopefully I'll have a finished object post later this week.

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Oh my

Darling husband and I moved to a new apartment last weekend and boy does packing/unpacking/etc. put a damper on blogging. Surprisingly, I have managed to get a fair amount of knitting done over the last couple of weeks (mostly socks) and even have a few pictures. Now, if only I could find the USB cord for the camera I would even upload and post them.

Spinning? The poor wheel has been sitting unused and neglected for the last week or so and both flyers (original and WooLee Winder) are resting in the bin full of fiber. Once we get the air conditioner set up, I'll think about getting the spinning wheel going again. It's just too hot and muggy to spin without it.

That's it for now. I just thought I'd write up a quick post to say that I haven't fallen off the face of the earth and that more interesting stuff is coming (just as soon as I find that USB).