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 (-:

Assorted Fiber projects this weekend

This is me plying my two suri singles while watching "Ice Station Zebra" last night. This is the same yarn I started when i got my e-spinner, Essy, last Saturday. Each single is about 3.5 ounces and I finished plying just as "Where Eagles Dare" started - It was "movies based on Allistair Maclean books" night last night. When I'm done here I'll wind this off into a skein and start some brown huacaya from our boy Evgeny. If Tim gets going on the scarves with his sock machine he might be able to make one using this yarn!

I started a scarf earlier using white suri fiber and red/yellow silk hankies (finished project below). I completed that and it's now drying over a chair. I decided to do another scarf using the suri. I also decided to not be as careful about the fiber layout this time around - which is the chaos in the picture to the left. This is actually a picture of two layers of fiber. I did a total of three and then filled in the thin spots after the first round on my machine.

In case I didn't post this before - this is my felting machine. It's a Celtic Moon Princess. Projects can be up to two feet wide and the length is only limited by what can fit between the rollers. It won't completely full the felt, but it comes awfully close. The last step for most of my projects is to go for a vinegar rinse in my front loading washer. I don't have that in the rental, but I found out today that our builder can hook mine up at the house sometime this week - yay!!!

This is the result of the chaotic fiber layout. I left the edges alone to keep with the primitive or organic look. The locks are visible in the felt which is another cool effect. This will definitely go in my Charlie line of scarves. At some point I'll beat or rub the pattern left by the pool mat. Sometimes I leave it because it can make the lace felt look even lacier.

This is the final result of the suri with silk hankies scarf. You can't see the edge that didn't felt to the body of the scarf. That happened because I didn't do the plastic right for the straight edges I wanted on this scarf. What I did instead was put plastic between the edge and the body so instead of a nice straight edge I had what you see in the last picture.

Instead of folding the stray fiber over to the body of the scarf, somehow the plastic was folded between the body and the fiber. The edge looked straight but obviously wasn't. I'm probably going to have to try and needle this edge into place or simply snip off the excess fiber.