Happy Earth Day

This little strip of earth is a bit cleaner today.
And two bags of plastic bits and pieces are no longer on their way to the San Francisco Bay and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Hope your earth day was a good one!

All about the lace weight

It all started with this test of my weaving skills. It is the first project on my loom that I didn't just use scrap yarn for. Unfortunately, I had almost a 3/4s of a skein on the orange lace weight weft yarn and I didn't want it to go to waste.

So the leftover got tunred into this. It only took me a week to make although it was a week where I had more than average knitting time because we drove down south to Disneyland. Since I didn't have to do much of the driving it allowed for a lot of knitting time.

Here is the same scarf on the blocking wires.

And on to the next lace project...

Passover 2010

Last Monday our family all traveled to the South Bay to David's uncle and aunts's house to celebrate the first night of Passover.

Before we officially began Lauren a Klezmer piece for us to set the mood. It was lovely to hear her play for us.

Lena being the youngest sang the four question for us all.


The most photographically interesting part of the evening, of course, is when everyone loads up their matzah with horseradish and takes a big bite.

Sock, socks all around

I finally finished that socks that I was making for my brother's birthday. They are from Socks from the Toe Up a book that I adore, but whose socks always turn out to wide for the narrow feet in my family. I have yet to find a sock pattern that I don't have to adapt to my families feet to make them fit.
The yarn is just Knit Picks kettle dyes that they discontinued. I think that people didn't like it because they didn't have that much shade variation in the yarn. I hope that they do come out with another kettle dyed sock yarn because I really do like kettle dyed and knit picks prices are great. I have found that their sock yarns do hold up to being used just like commercially knit socks.

Of course, I need to cast on another pair of socks and the Koo-aid dyed socks won the day...

More on Yarn Dyeing

So here are the results of the Kool-aid dying project. I ended up with more white than I wanted and two purple fingers. It faded pretty quick, but I can't believe that I used to drink this stuff. I mean, if it is strong enough to dye yarn with..It has a tie-dye look to is that is kind of fun. I definately have some ideas on how to do it better the next time around. All in all, because I used Knitpicks Bare sock yarn the whole project was pretty cheap.
Here is the site that I got my directions from in case you are interested in dyeing with Kool-aid.

Going Slow

Things have been going pretty slow on the crafting front. I have managed to finish up a few projects. I don't have photos of them all I have a couple of shots of what I have been up to.

Lena got a simple pair of socks and matching knit cap for her birthday. I will post my toe up pattern on the blog soon. She is pretty happy with the set but says that she needs matching gloves...How fast does this kid think I knit.

I have been wanting to play around with dyeing yarn for a while ant I finally took the plunge and tried dyeing with this stuff...

I am not sure that is is good for drinking, but it sure soaks into the yarn and fingers well. I had set my spoon down and stirred in the purple with my finger. I am not sure what I was thinking with that one. The yarn should be dry tomorrow for a photo.

Monkey Party

The shortest month of the year certainly flew by in a hurry. The highlight of every, for our family, February is Bean's birthday.

This year she wanted to have a sock monkey party that, what is that I can hear you asking?

Well, as it turns out it is sitting around with a bunch of other girls stuffing and sewing sock monkeys while watching I Love Lucy on the TV. All I had to do was sew up all the socks on the sewing machine before the the party.

The star of the party was the sock monkey cake that we ordered. We don't usually buy a birthday cake, so the birthday girl was very impressed by the cake.