Fiber Fool

I have one last class at My Sister Knits this summer. Every time I am at the shop I see at least one person fondle the Siren Socks and exclaim they could never knit them. So, if you have been one of those persons here is your chance to prove yourself wrong! Learn tips for knitting lace into socks and keep track of pattern placements. Some sock knitting experience is recommended, but no lace experience is required for this class. There are three sessions on Tuesday mornings from 9-11 starting next week!

Siren Socks - Tuesdays, August 5th, 12th, and 26th, 9-11 am - Have you admired these gorgeous lace socks displayed in the shop these last few months and thought you couldn’t knit them? Guess again! The Siren Socks are not difficult to knit and the designer will help guide you through the process. The lace accented sock has enough body to still keep your feet warm and will make a terrific addition to your fall sock wardrobe. Sock knitting experience recommended, lace experience not required. Must be able to knit in the round on double pointed needles. $65 + supplies (instructional hand-outs included).

To sign up, stop in or call My Sister Knits at (970) 407-1461 and reserve your place with a credit card.

Pssttt, Kristi’s has added her fall class schedule to the Fiber Art Classes page, so go get a sneak peak! And don’t forget to sign up for the class newsletter.

This morning I ran soaker hoses for the garden and picked basil for pesto dinner tonight. I even went to the grocery store for some supplies to make dinner a bit healthier. The garden chores are always more fun with bright orange shoes and an orange herb cutter! :-)

I also inventoried worsted weight wools and some odds and ends that didn’t get sorted in the great haul out. I’m about out of cubes. I may have one or two left. Or, those two may become one for odds and end scrap yarns and one for undyed blank yarns… I haven’t decided yet.

Either way, my fiber stash isn’t going to fit in the tower of cubes. I’m pretty sure that will hold true even if I pull out sweater quantities of yarn from the other bins and put them in the zipper bags from linen purchases. So, anyone have brilliant ideas for fiber storage? I could stack a few more of the bins (assuming they have any left at the store) below my egress window between the towers and the desk. Though I was kind of hoping for a short bookshelf to fit there… I suppose I could maybe do some sort of flat-topped trunk and then have some books on top of that with bookends? It isn’t like I dig in my fiber stash that frequently. Any other great ideas??

Well, swapping out the cable modem didn’t fix our issue at all. That said, I was rather impressed with our service. We called after noon on Saturday to schedule for a technician to come out. I expected at that point we’d have to wait until Monday to get things fixed, but within about 4 hours we had a tech at the house trying to track down the problem. It ended up the outdoor connections just needed reseated and we were back in business - go figure.

But, I’ve remained absent for a good reason… We have one cable outlet in the entire house. It is in my studio (a pseudo spare room in the corner of the basement). It is in the yarn corner of my studio. My studio is the junk drawer of out house - someone is coming over at the last minute? Just shove it in the studio. So, in order for that tech to come out the studio needed exhumed. So, I got out bankers boxes and boxed up yarn accroding to fiber content and weight and put index cards on top so if I didn’t get stuff unboxed quickly I could still find what i needed. That said, uncovering carpet that hasn’t seen the light of day in who knows how long has energized me to get that room clean and functional once again. So, that is where I have been since the last post.

I got myself some collapsable cubes that fit inside my towers of metal cubes and I’ve been sorting and inventorying my stash. I got rid of two huge bags of yarn yesterday - mostly box store yarns with high acrylic content. They went to good homes so I feel good about that. I have all my fingering and sport weight yarns in 3 (out of 10) cubes and inventoried! This morning I need to sort the cottons as a friend is stopping by to see if she wants any of the cottons I wish to get rid of. What she doesn’t take will go to the same group the acrylic stuff went to next week.

On that note, I need to get sorting. With the busy summer and now this organizational binge I’m finding Plurk’s micro-blogging format to be much easier to squeeze in here and there. So head over there and look me up if you’re going through withdrawl ;-)

Oh, and I’m totally open to suggestions and tips on stash organization! My biggest question at the moment is how I want to deal with my circular needles. In a lot of cases I’m guessing I no longer have the original packaging.

Well, I had all these intentions to get some blogging done, but I found myself under a pile of to-do’s and sweating profusely in an 80 degree house most of the week. And, in fact, I’m only writing today because I thought I should let it be known that we do not have working Internet at home right now. We’ve exchanged cable modems but can’t be certain that will fix the issue. So, if you e-mail me or message me on Ravelry etc. answers may be delayed because of this. Hopefully we’ll get home from the coffeeshop and find the new modem did the trick, but in case it doesn’t that is why you may not hear from me.

We did kind of kick of the weekend a tad early and spent yesterday afternoon and evening down in Boulder. We met up with Niki at the newish Purl Knit Cafe, and then met Kristi and her husband and one of his co-workers at Avery. Then Debbie joined us as well. We wrapped up the evening at Leaf - a real nice vegetarian/vegan restaurant near Pearl St. Mall. Between meet-ups DH and I even snuck in a cuppa at Dushanbe! Oh, and I know you all are on pins and needles to know what the real colorname of the fiber in the previous post was, right? It’s Rose! Kind of what I figured, but I’m glad I got to see a color card in person before making that decision.

The photo at the top of the post is of one of the blooms we got on the baby daylily that Cathy shared with us last year. It’s still in a rather shallow pot so I wasn’t expecting blooms, but that little pot must have produce a good 6 or 7 blooms over the course of a couple weeks. It is right on our front step so it was really nice to walk out of the house and see that spot of color. Thanks, Cathy!

This is the most recent handspun off the wheel. It’s Ashland Bay Merino/Tussah 70/30 blend. I bought it as Estes Park Wool Market this year for a specific project that requires the colorway to be noted. While spinning it up it seemed to have a bit of a purple-like cast to it that just did not seem autumnal to me. Now after photographing it in natural sunlight and having looked at the colorways are various websites of purveyors of Ashland Bay I’m a little less dubious about the colorway. But, what do you thing? Have you spun the Autumn colorway? Is it a final color you wouldn’t necessarily call autumn?

And the unspun fiber shots (also taken in natural sunlight but almost a month ago so light conditions are likely not the same between it and the yarn and postprocessing was done separately as wel):

ETA: I’m not looking for a random name. I’m trying to identify which colorway of fiber it really is :-)