More projects ....

With the melting of all this snow we've had I have the urge to complete a million projects I've had sitting around for days, weeks ... and a couple of them even months! Maybe it's the coming of spring that got me feeling that way, out with the old ... in with the new. I haven't been felting much this past winter just because I have everything set up for it in my basement .... except it's not that warm down there and I have no running water down there yet. That's hopefully going to be one of my dear husbands projects for this coming summer so I will be spending more time down there to work on some of my wet-felting projects. I've been wanting to test out some other ideas I've had wiggling around in my head lately but I definitely need a sink and water for that. I had planned on getting to learn how to spin this winter .... well do I need to say more .... that didn't happen ... yet! Been too busy doing other things so that's still on my "wanting to learn" list. Have a happy day everybody.
I finished this little square top baby beret the other day, it's in my PurplePlatypus store on Etsy if you want to see more pictures of it.

Bonnets, spinning and some sassy booties

I've been making some bonnets lately, a bear one (which I sold on Etsy yesterday! Yeahhhh! Thank you to my customer.) and then I made this pink one but of course .... I had to change the pattern around ... turned out bigger ears and a ruffled edging compared to the bear one I had made. So now I don't think it looks like a bear, more like a cat I would say. Anyway, it still looks cute which is the important part. Hopefully somebody else thinks that way and will buy it.

My spinning adventure hasn't gotten much further then trying it out at the meeting the other day. I just haven't had the time to sit down, relax and try to spin some yarn. But ... I've promised myself during the coming winter months I will manage to spin some yarn, for now I just keep thinking about it, the doing part will have to wait a bit.

So how about those sassy baby booties! I again managed to change a pattern which means they turned out totally different looking then what the original pattern looked like. Good thing I remembered to write down what I changed on the pattern since I had to make a matching pair I figured I better do so.

I also finished felting another scarf. A pink one with some wild alpaca handspun yarns (not by me! ... yet!). I need to work on it some more before I take some pictures of it.

And ... I promised Sofie we'd start painting her room. I showed her how to patch up all the holes in the walls from where her posters used to be so she went to work earlier this evening and patched them up. We're waiting for it to dry so tomorrow I will show her how to sand it all down. She's already taped off the doors and windows in her reading nook which will be the first part that gets painted. She changed her colors from the original wanting to have Twilight colors (black and red!!!! Vampire style! Yikes!!!!!) to a totally different color scheme now purple, mint green and white .... sooooooo much prettier I must say.

Time to start felting some more so off I go.

Ready for a new adventure

Yep, I'm finally going to do it! I'm going to learn how to spin! Might not be a very exciting thing for a lot of folks but for me it's a big deal. Ever since I was little (6 to be precise!) I wanted to learn how to spin my own yarn. Mostly because I was never happy with the plain old yarn anybody and everybody could purchase at the local yarn shops. So, it's only taking me half a century to finally being able to learn to spin yarn. While living in Alice Springs I had the opportunity to purchase an Ashford traditional wheel for a very good price. Since it included 2 huge bags of fleece (and I mean garbage size bags!) I couldn't go wrong buying it, heck I could always felt with all that fleece. I did use about 1/4 of the fleece for felting and left the rest of it behind at Central Craft when I moved back to the US. I even purchased the maintenance kit for the wheel, I figured I would need it if and when I learned how to use the darn thing. So time when by and I even went as far as putting my name on the waiting list for the next "learning how to spin" session at Central Craft. But ... it didn't happen. Either the class was cancelled and/or I had something else planned so my poor wheel sat there collecting dust.

But, tomorrow is the big day. Our neighbor came and asked me if I wanted to join her tomorrow at the Fiber Art Guild get together here in Warrenton. A couple of weeks ago we had a garage sale, that's when Jean (our neighbor) came by and we started to chat about arts and crafts and I'll be darn, I found out she's a spinner, besides a whole bunch of other things she's really good at. And the best thing is .... she has the exact same wheel as I do so it should be pretty easy for me to follow along as she will be teaching me how to spin. Heck, I already have tons of fleece (the kind I use for felting) and other fiber I can later incorporate into making some wacky yarns. Hopefully I won't get too bored having to learn to spin some good old fashion yarn before I can get into spinning up some crazy yarns. The kind with all kinds of things sticking out. See, once I get the spinning my own yarn down I can move on to yet another thing I've always wanted to learn how to do ... dyeing my own yarn. I've already experimented with dyeing my fleece in the microwave using food coloring as well as the kool aid powder but I want to get into using plants to do it. Of course my husband is afraid my next request will be having to move back into the country so I can finally have my own angora goats and rabbits, besides an Alpaca, a llama and some sheep. He really wouldn't mind since that's just a great excuse then for him to be able to get his manly tractor, snow plow (that's if we end up staying in Virginia of course) and we might just have to get another Australian Sheppard or Border Collie to keep that herd under control. And oh yes, how could I forget .... Sofie could finally have her horse .... a Curly hair horse of all things! Wonder why .... well in case you don't know, that's the only kind of horse hair that you can felt with!