Travel, Yarn Store, Hospital, and clean fleece.

Last weekend went by so fast!  Most weekends do...Friday night we flew up to Ohio to visit Special K's family.  The weekend was great but went by so fast.  Here is a quick recap of the weekend.  Saturday, we went to the Festival of Arts in the town that Special K grew up. It was so cute and lots of good food, craftiness and fun.  We walked around and I got to meet one of Special K's friends he grew up with that is a knitter.  I'm working on getting her to spin. 

Favors from the baby shower

Sunday, I thought we were going to go back to the Festival but turns out that my MIL had different plans such as throwing me a fantastic surprise baby shower!!  I had no idea they had been planning this or that it was actually the reason why we flew up there in the first place!  The baby shower was awesome and again lots of yummy food and family time!! 

Guests at the baby shower

The rest of the weekend was spent with family.  We stayed with SK's grandparents and it was really nice spending time with them especially since Papa has been sick. 

Standing outside Natural Stitches

Our last day was Tuesday and since SK got to go golfing on Monday I insisted that we stop at a yarn store on the way to the airport.  I had called around and asked for references and the one that I picked was Natural Stitches.  The store had a lot of room and lots of inventory!!  They had this wall of cascade with every color you could imagine!!  They also had some awesome steeler yarn but Sk didn't want me to buy it.  I did buy two things:

Tosh sock in Tart

Malabrigo Worsted in Polar Morn

We managed to get to the airport on time even though we got a little lots in Pittsburgh.  This was the first visit we actually drove into Pittsburgh so it was awesome to be able to see the city!  Love all the bridges.

Tuesday when we got back, we went out to dinner for SK's dad and by the time we got home it was after 10pm.  I was pretty tired and went to bed as soon as I could.  Since then, I managed to get a head cold which is now taking residence in my chest.  This is actually the first time since I've been pregnant to really be sick so I guess I should say I've been lucky.

Yesterday, we had our Tea and Tour of the Baby hospital we are delivering at.  It was great to see the area and to know what we are supposed to do.  The rooms are nice too!

Today while Special K was off golfing with his dad, I finished scouring the black corriedale fleece I bought at SAFF last year.  I'm still planning on making it a Cardigan...right now there are two patterns in the running.  I'm going to spin it up from the locks and then decide which to knit.  I had this fiber drying outside but then it started raining so I moved it in before SK got home. :)  He normally doesn't like wet fiber in the house but we are both stuffy and this fleece is nice and clean so that house doesn't smell that bad.

Fleece drying on table.

Well...hope everyone has had a great week.  I'm postponing recording the podcast until my throat gets better.  Hoping that is before next weekend....which is Florida Fiber In weekend!  YAY!!

Happy Knitting, Spinning, and Weekends!!!

Baby knits, spinning away, and dirty fleece

Wow, how time can run away with you! Well, it can me. This past weekend was a blur of spinning and spending time with friends and family.  I'm in the zone when it comes to my spinning lately.  The summer tour spinning goal of spinning 10 minutes a day every day jump started my spinning mojo and now I crave spinning every day.  There were many days in the last month I spent way more than 10 minutes of spinning, especially this Saturday when I think I probably spun for several hours.

Before I go into details about my spinning, let's start with the cutest called BABY KNITTING!  I cast on the first cardigan for CGR aka my baby last week using the pattern  Maile Sweater by Nikki Van De Car and some sock yarn from NHknittingmama.com.  The knitting went fast until I got to the sleeves but I finally joined them tonight and so hopefully it will go quickly and be done by Friday before we head to Ohio.  So far it's looking great though!

CGR's baby cardigan

While I was spinning the brown merino that was pictured in the last post, I realized that I wanted to do a cable ply.  Which means, I'm going to ply two singles together and then ply those two together to end up with the four singles being plied.  Yes, that is very informative I know.  I'll go into more detail as the process goes, but after asking some people on twitter I realized that I would need to add some extra twist to the singles so when I ply them twice they still have some twist.  That meant that I had to go back to add extra twist, so I ran both the brown merino singles back through the wheel this weekend.  I have more room on both the bobbins so I may spin more of the brown onto these singles before I ply them together.

I was also able to finish spinning up the Cormo single I was working on and have moved on to the Corriedale roving.  Here is a picture of the Cormo before I run it back through the wheel to add more twist.

Cormo on the wheel.

This weekend I also spent some time cleaning some of the Black Corriedale fleece I bought at last year's SAFF.  I love this fleece and it's coated so it's mostly very clean!!  I was able to clean 13 oz in 2 hours.  That made me very happy!  With what I had already cleaned, I'm up to a little over 1 lb of clean locks from this fleece.  I have about 3 lbs left.  Once I'm done cleaning it, which I hope will be before the baby comes...even before the Florida Fiber In would be great too, I plan to use this for a cardigan.  Here is a picture of the drying locks.  The tips look a lot more bleached in this picture than they really are but you get the point.  These lock are like jackjack...hard to take pictures of.

Clean Corriedale locks

So, that is a recap of my crafting life.  I feel very productive when it comes to crafting lately.  I'm in the zone!  This weekend, I will be away from my wheel but I plan to bring knitting.  Since we are not checking luggage, I'll probably cast on a pair of gloves for a Christmas gift and take that along.  That is one of the reason why I want to finish the cardigan before the weekend...so I don't feel the need to take it with me.  I might also bring a baby hat since it's a simple knit.  You can't over pack the number of knitting projects for travel.  I will be away from my stash.

Other than crafting, I was able to organize the baby's room closet and you can now see the floor!  There is lots to do but I have time...or at least I'll keep saying that until I don't have anymore time.

Hope you have a great week and a great Labor Day weekend.  I will hopefully get lots of pictures to share from our Labor Day weekend in Ohio with Special K's family!  I'm looking forward to seeing all of them!

Happy Knitting, Spinning, and Travel! 

Spinning and Knitting and Fleeces away!

Oh the week has flown by...so glad it's the weekend!!  We'll start with crafting because that's the fun part of my week.  I've managed to keep up with my goal for the Summer Tour Spinning.  Every day even if it's only 15 minutes, I've been spinning.  Thursday I spent two hours spinning while watching a movie.  I've still got a lot of spinning to do though and loving every minute of it!  I've been working on spinning up the cormo single and the brown merino singles.  Once I fill those three bobbins then I'll move on to the white Corriedale single.

Spinning Cormo

 A friend Catie is coming over tonight, she is neither a spinner or knitter but we are planning to watch hours of Trueblood Season 3 so I plan to spin spin spin!  Her boyfriend and my husband are going to their fantasy football draft so we plan to do anything but hang out with them.

For a knitting update, I've been working diligently on my Shalom Cardigan goal.  Which is to beat how many days I knit it last time.  So far, I've been knitting it for a week and I'm almost done!!  I have the sleeves left and then I'll be ready to weave in ends and sew on buttons.  I'm hoping I can finish it today!!  This morning I met up with Manda at a bakery near her house called Frida's!  It was SOO yummy!  I had a bacon, egg and cheese bagel with some very yummy coffee.  We sat and knit and talked for several hours and had a wonderful time.  I brought home some donuts for Special K and he enjoyed them. 

Knitting at Frida's with Manda

 Our plan was to go to the UPS store after and send off our fleeces but we decided after spending so much time there, that she would send them off on Monday. So, one of my fleeces has been handled.  I still need to split up the two smaller fleeces I have in lock formation and get them ready to clean.  I'm going to work on filling up a bunch of lingerie bags and have them ready to scour them all at once!  If I can get these two fleece's cleaned before the baby gets here I will be very happy!

Raw Dirty Fleece when I first got it.

Baby update, she is doing very well.  She is enjoying her little soccer game in my belly and getting really good and making every kick count.  Special K has now been able to really feel her which I love because it's amazing to share this feeling with him!  My belly is growing and I'll work on getting a picture of it soon.   We've also been working on finding a daycare.  We met one of our options on Friday and we both really liked her.  She's close, nice, comes highly recommended.  We meet another one on Tuesday and hopefully we'll have one set by the end of next week so I can take this worry off my plate.  It's so hard to know who you can trust with your baby! 

I hope everyone is having a great weekend!  I'm hoping to have my podcast recorded tomorrow while Special K is golfing.  

Happy Knitting, Spinning and Fleecy goodness!!

A new toy, and some fleecy goodness!!

This weekend was pretty crazy! Special K had a friend from home in town for the weekend so we stayed out late! I also had lots of things that I had to do...such as helping out with the Pinellas Weavers Guild Auction. Every other year we do an auction and the other years we have a sale. The auction was a lot of fun but the best part was that I got a loom for $12!!! I was so flipping excited! It's missing the heddles and I need a shuttle and a reed threader but otherwise I can't wait to get it working!!

Look how pretty it is after I wiped it down with some wool oil.
If you know what kind of loom this is or have any advice...PLEASE...do share! Thank you so much!
Also this weekend I managed to scour some of the black Corriedale fleece I have. I separated them into locks and scoured in lock formation because I plan to comb them. They came out so pretty!

Here are all the yummy fleecy goodness laying to dry!
Well..I hope everyone is doing great! I hope you enjoyed this drive by posting! ;)

Carding Alpaca...

Remind me not to do that again!! First off, I didn't clean it before hand because it's pretty much just sandy...ugh! My allergies are now killing me from all the dust that carding up dirty Alpaca caused...also just want to say this now. I, Gnat, am not a fan of processing Alpaca..if I say that I plan to do this again...please send me an email or message and direct me back here. I will not say that I don't like alpaca but I will say...not a fan of the processing or at least the carding of it!

I chose to blend it with some of my raw Corriedale/Merinolocks that I had dyed brown and I will admit that I LOVE the batts that came out of this process and can't wait to spin them up but I did not enjoy the process nor will I enjoy cleaning up the carder after this process...ugh!

Ok...so since I've complained enough...here is your reward. A picture of my LOVELY alpaca batts. They are fantastic but I will not repeat the process. Hopefully these 5 oz will get me some nice fingerless gloves because I plan to swap the rest of this beautiful fleece the next chance I get. I still have about 6 oz...so if you want to buy it off me or swap me some wooly goodness let me know!
I just checked...I have about 7 oz left of the 100% Suri Raw fleece from an alpaca named Sarletoni. :) It's a beautiful mahogany brown fleece.

Ok...well..it's already 11 and past my bedtime! I'm off to bed. Tomorrow is another day and hopefully after work I will get a chance to clean the carder and more of my raw Corriedale/Merino fleece so I can get started on that project.

I'm still trying to get back up! Frankie is better!

Ok...so yes you can blame the twilight series for my lack of posts. :) At least this time....I started the first book last monday and I am already reading the last book Breaking Dawn and really I think it's my favorite. A lot of people bashed it but I loved it!! I thought the twists were great and am loving reading them again!

Ok..enough about Edward and Bella! Back to knitting and dogs. We will first do dogs. :) OK...here's my DOT post a day early.

I thought I'd share video of Frankie and Abigail playing. He is back to his normal crazy self. He is also back to sitting for me. With the bandages on, he wouldn't sit not matter what I did. Now he's sitting along with the rest of them. He is a good boy!

Also I'm sorry about the bad video lighting. It was an impromptu video taping. I'll work on getting better video of them playing it's hilarious!! Especially when Jackjack gets involved. :) He was too busy sleeping to play at this point.

after the water break...they started back up! :)

Ok.....knitting. I have been knitting a bit during training calls at work and some over the weekend but honestly all I've done is read! :) hehehe I'm almost done with my dad's vest and I'm TERRIFIED of running out of yarn. I hope I don't but if I do I guess I'll have to do another knitpicks order. ugh... :) hehehe I'll be knitting at knit night tonight so hopefully I'll get some progress done.

Here is the vest prior to the frogging it went through.
I forgot I had these pictures to share with you but here is post frogging yarn. That is a lot of knitting that got ripped back but it's for my dad so it's got to be as close to perfect as possible. The reason it was frogged is because I was knitting a size too small. I'm already back to where I was and more so I'm good. I can't wait to finish but again...fear the running out of yarn!
The yarn was washed before I started re-knitting. I'm not a fan of knitting with kinky yarn. heheh

Spinning...I've been spinning even though I'm not knitting. I spun at my guild's meet up this weekend. We had 20 people there and 5 new members joined! It was AWESOME! I also found a place to stay for SAFF in North Carolina in October so I have officially decided to go to the Southeastern Animal Fiber Fair! YEAH!! I'm so excited. I've already started working on getting a meet n greet set up and also get goodie bags! FUN!! As soon as I iron out the details I'll let you all know if you are going where to meet me! :) Not that I'm a celebrity or anything but I would love to meet my listeners or readers!
I also took a break from reading on Monday and spun. :) I'm working on the blue superwash merino batt. It is spinning up SOOO nicely! I love batts now!!

I also cleaned another pound and a half of the fleece! It's coming along nicely and I can't wait to card more and figure out what I'd like to spin up! I'm thinking a shawl. First though I am going to play with dying it!Ok...well..hope everyone is doing well! Miss you all and sorry about being such a bad blogger and blog reader lately. I'll work on it. I should have a podcast up by Saturday or Sunday! So keep your ear out for that!

Happy Spinning, Knitting, and DOGGIES!! :)