Tag: winter

Spinning Quite a Yarn

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I was super excited when Lauren McElroy’s Crafter’s Box collaboration was announced. I love her Instagram content and have always been interested in learning to use a drop spindle, so it was a perfect box to spend some birthday money on.

There was a small bit of a learning curve, as you can see from the progression in that photo, but the video class was so easy to follow. I even started incorporating some color with some roving from Ganxxet.

Once I had a good amount of two-ply yarn, I wanted to create a project with it. I swatched a bit in crochet and knitting to decide which looked better. The crochet showed off the variation in the thickness (which we will pretend was intentional), so I started a hat.

The yarns I used were about 4-5 WPI, and I roughly measured the smallest amount to find out that I had about 6.9 yards per 10 grams. This hat used 58 grams of the all-white yarn and 41 grams of the blue/purple/white yarn. Really rough estimates mean that I used around 68.31 yards in total.

I’ve also started experimenting with chain plying the yarn (the two small skeins in this picture), which is a lot of fun. I don’t have enough of it yet to do much with it, but I’m thinking maybe gloves.

If you are looking to learn drop spindle spinning, I’d definitely recommend this kit. It’s still available through The Crafter’s Box Marketplace, and they have some accessories you can also pick up through the marketplace to create even more yarns.

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400 Stitches in 60 Days (Take Two)

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Okay, let me try this again.

I recently got the book 400 Knitting Stitches as a resource for my knitting. As I started looking through all the different stitch patterns, I saw many cool patterns I wanted to try. With way too many random piles of leftover acrylic yarns I don’t want to use for any other projects, I decided to turn this book into a project.

I’m casting on somewhere around 21 stitches for each (depending on the number of stitches needed for the pattern), including 4 edge stitches (2 on each side). Obviously there is going to be some variation in the sizes. Once I’m done I’ll stitch them together into blankets for Project Linus.

As the title implies, I’m going to attempt to do this in just 2 months. I started on March 29, so I hope to be done making the squares by May 28. Then I will start the blanket-making process, hopefully getting done within a week or so. Because I don’t want to be making blankets in the middle of summer, even kid-sized blankets.

When I first came up with the idea for this, I thought I’d post the pictures of the ones I’d done every day. Not going to happen. But the photos of all the squares can be found in this album, updated frequently.

Wintery Birthday Presents

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My grandma’s birthday was this past week, and with wintery temperatures and storms and such this time of year what better present than a matching scarf and hat set. Wow, that was a long sentence.

Lotus Stitch Scarf and Hat

The hat is made from the Third Base Line’s Lotus Hat, and the scarf is just the lotus chart twice each row with a garter stitch border for five feet.

Detail of scarf
Detail of hat

They were both made from Loops & Threads “Incredible”. Eventually I will become better about posting these things to Craftsy and Ravelry with actual information…