Category: fiber art
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Embroidering with Hand Spun: Experience & Tips
Here’s where I am with my next embroidery project using my hand spun. This time around I’m intentionally spinning for embroidery rather than using hand spun yarn I had spun with knitting in mind. The red and pink of the flowers are what I started with and both yarns come from the same fleece I…
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The Sky and Grass Handspun Sweater
Last January, I started to spin four braids of Wool for the Dame merino wool, three green and one blue. I started with the greens and decided to spin a giant true 3 ply, spinning straight from the braids. Unfortunately, I didn’t take pictures of the greens before spinning them; here they all are on…
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Patience
I started this embroidery project in 2016 or 2017 with the idea of doing something extra special with the materials and tools, which kind of accumulated over time. I’ve discovered that I work best this way, albeit extremely slowly. But what’s the rush? I name this project Patience only after considering calling it Meditation because…
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Alhambra
Way back in 2010ish my friend Alana was making Anne Hanson’s Alhambra, I think after a trip to Spain to see the castle itself. At the time, I was focused on other things, like learning how to spin, and then roller derby came along and I nearly stopped crafting 2011-2015, when I retired. But I…
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Coopworth Batwing
I knit a batwing in an attempt to knit a shawl using handspun Coopworth yarn. See? This is another project that I made from spinning the yarn all the way to FO, only I don’t have pictures of the fiber or the spinning process. I’m not even sure when I spun the yarn; I know…
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Peasant Cap: From Spinning Fiber to Finished Object
I spun the yarn for my latest hat during Tour de Fleece 2018 and Spinzilla 2017 (the only Spinzilla I’ve done). Both started out life as 2 ply fractal spun yarns, but I ended up cable plying them both, which essentially means I made the 2 ply yarns into center pull balls and plied the…
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My First Sweater Made With Hand Spun Yarn
You would think I carefully planned my first hand spun (and first steeked) sweater but, dear reader, I did not. I just got lucky. I bought a brown merino x fleece at a local farm when my knitting group visited it in spring 2010. I had just started spinning the previous summer and this fleece…
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Spinning: My Wheels
I started researching spinning wheels in the summer of 2009 and ended up buying a 1970s-era Ashford Traditional that had 2 bobbins and a really bad stain job. Researching wheels and all the options available was really overwhelming; I had no idea what to look for or the advantage or use of one thing over…
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Spinning: How I Started
In the fall of 2009, I joined a fairly new knitting group that met at a local Panera. As is often the case, many of them did more than knit and some crocheted. One woman was coming off a jag of cross stitching. A few had learned to spin and would bring their drop spindles…
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Color Blending: The Circle
A while ago, a wrote about learning how to make rolags on my drum carder this spring. After coming up with a few combinations of gifted roving, I made sets of gradients between two colors, starting with a bright green and an aqua. I’ve done this before – when I made my first Bohus cardigan.…
Little Golden Notebook 