And Now for March!

Unbelieveable!  It's now March - where is the year going?!  We were busy in February - clearing the fallen trees in the pasture, repairing fences, working on scarves and hats, taking fiber to Superior Fiber for processing into roving and yarn.  Not to mention making more cheese and taking care of the farm and the kids etc.  Oh- and the day job, can't forget the day job. 

Thanks to my day job I spent two sunny days in San Leandro, CA learning how to safely climb ladders and drive defensively.  The upside is I get to see if I get a discount on my insurance since I passed the driving class.  Yay me!

This weekend I'm headed to a three day retreat focused on spinning with my Hansen E-spinner.  It's the first spinning lesson I've had in YEARS, if not actual decades!  I'm very excited about it and can't wait to be on my way tomorrow!

I mentioned that I spent Frideay making scarves and hats and I actually have the pictures to prove it.

hat and scarf ensemble

This is a matching hat and scarf made from beige fiber from Samson.  I thought it needed something so needled on the flower and leaves.  The two were created using warm soapy water - the scarf was rolled in bubble wrap and the hat was made "on a ball". 

I made four sets of matching hats and scarves including the black hat on the right.  I'll post pictures of the other two as soon as I take some decent photos - the pictures I have are terrible.


I also found a wonderful scarf idea in the handbook I got with my new felting machine from Anne Vickrey Evans (FeltCrafts).  These are two scarves, silk, that started out the same length and width.  I used white fiber for the scarf on the right and brown for the other one.  They were rolled on the machine and then fulled in the dryer.  Besides color the only other difference was the amount of fiber used - I used very little for the brown scarf and quite a bit more for the other.

For the scarf on the right I used a navy blue dyed fiber and filled it fairly full.  I'll have to add a finished picture when I get it along with the picture of the scarf I filled with black fiber - that one is pretty amazing.

I'm also working on more fish and have decided to try a slightly different approach - insted of felting the tail and fins as part of the body work I'm going to needle them on after the body is complete and stuffed.  Along with the lips, eyes and other details. 

My goal is to make a bunch that I can take with me when I got to Detroit for the rest of my training in April.  I'll be there six days and this should give me something to do - plus I can always bring my e-spinner and fiber (-:

My New Toy!

This isn't directly felting related, but it's my new Hansen mini-spinner. Yes, the slight blurr is from it running while we were heading to Snohomish in the truck. This little beast has a regular wall power adapter as well as a cigarette lighter adapter! It's the quietest electric spinner I've heard and weighs in at around 4lbs. That's a jumbo woolee-winder too!

I've decided to use my Ashford when I'm at craft fairs and such since it's much more what people expect of a spinning wheel AND I rarely have power available. But for the most part this is now my spinner of choice and it's making short work of the suri I'm spinning in the picture.

As for felting - I had to return Chad's book to the library, I'm sure to her relief based on my first hat! I do have a few of her other books and Jorie Johnson's that I will be using as a guide/goad to keep me felting. But I'm going back to my scarves to get some made for Valentine's Day. I've got some beautiful hand dyed silk from Lori Flood and I'm determined to make one scarf from each piece. I'm also going to try 100% suri for one of those scarves.

Suri is the harder of the two types of alpaca to felt, but the results are usually worth the work. I've got a "cloud" of white suri fiber that I will be using for this effort. I'm also going to prefelt some hearts in a variety of colors and sizes to felt my other scarves, both laminate and straight felt.

I'm also not giving up on the hats!!! There's just not enough time in the day - the usual lament.