handmade by stefanie

Spinzilla started at 12:01 AM on October 5, and I have been spinning up a storm with every free moment I get. Since the start, I have filled a total of 5 bobbins: the three at the bottom are spun from  Louet Jacob fiber, the top right was spun from some of my blending board rolags, and the top right is a braid of fiber from the Cloudlover fiber club. I know my original plan was to wait til Spinzilla was over to ply, but that cake of singles you see in the photo above didn't go so well (the other side is NOT a pretty picture!). I decided to ply all of the Jacob singles into a 3-ply so that my Victoria bobbins could be efficiently cleared, and then I really went for broke, spinning with more blending board rolags and nearly filled a sixth  bobbin! It's safe to say that Spinzilla is off to a great start for me. Of course, I haven't found much time to knit, but I did make some progress on my WIPs over the weekend. For instance, I realized that I hadn't ripped far enou...

It's been a while since I posted a WIP Wednesday - but don't worry, the disappearance of this weekly feature was only temporary! At the moment, I have just two projects on the needles, and best of all...they are both for ME! The first is something I started in December, about 5 seconds after finishing my last holiday gift project: The pattern is the Lace Leaf Edge shawl by Jen Lucas which appeared in the Knit Accessories 2014 issue of Love of Knitting; I'm using the yarn called for in the pattern ( Lhasa Wilderness from Bijou Basin Ranch) in the Sassenach colorway. It's at the extremely hard-to-photograph stage since I've finished knitting the body of the shawl, and am now working across allllll of those stitches to create the lace border. I have a ways to go, but the chart is starting to go faster for me! My next WIP was started during my trip to Kansas City last week - my first sweater of 2015! I'm really hoping that this year will truly be the Year of...

Now that Spinzilla is officially over and I have double-checked my yardage calculations to include the leftover singles from my plied yarns for a total of 3404 yards, I am returning to the projects which have been forlorn in my knitting corner for the past week. Over the weekend, I finished the Chill Chaser sweater I had on the needles (spoiler alert for Friday!) and made some serious progress on my Chittery Chattery socks for various KALs which I'm participating in (more on those here ). I have only knit a few more rounds of my Wedge socks since last week's WIP Wednesday post, so it's probably not worth posting a photograph today. However, I did start something NEW as a reward for finishing a project over the weekend. For quite some time, I've been wanting to cast on for    Excelsior  from the  Holla Knits Home Collection , and the   Sweatshop of Love Fall KAL  which started at the beginning of this month is the perfect excuse! I'm using 3 color...

Over the weekend, I finished my Spindleberry Shawl , can you believe it? I wasn't planning to start a new project so close to TNNA, but I ended up casting on for a pair of socks with some Tibetan Dream that's been in my stash for a while now: The pattern is called The Hub of Fashion, and the body of the sock is knit sideways, something I've never done before! Here we have the rarely-seen Robin photobomb: I'm still not finished with my Dorper project for Spinning Spring Training ; I was hoping to at least finish the singles before I left town, but realistically, that's probably not going to happen: I've also been making progress on my North Hollow Cowl in the new yarn from Blue Sky Alpacas, Extra - over the weekend I finished the first half and started the second half: It's soooo soft! I am really enjoying working with it, and the design is turning out to be the right mix of mindless/mindful knitting: it took a little concentration to get every...

To those who celebrate the holiday today, Merry Christmas! Here is the holiday card my husband designed and silkscreened this year: It was his first year being in charge of the holiday cards, and his ambitious design took more than a little doing to come to fruition. You can bet next year's card won't be a four-color process, but I love how they turned out and it was well worth spending an entire snowy day printing. Here are some of the process photos I instagrammed along the way; it is typically my job to document the process as well as assist in any way I can: grabbing a clean cloth if Tyler gets ink on his hands, running freshly-printed cards to the next room to dry (which is always a challenge since the cats always try to follow me in....Tilly LOVES trying to walk through the drying cards). Whatever holiday you choose to celebrate, I hope it's wonderful!

I thought I would be sharing my finished Marin shawl today since I am so close to being done! However, I ran out of yarn (doh!) and have to wait for my order to arrive before I can get back to work. If only this had happened before I posted my only shareable FO earlier this week, the Berlin Cowl , which also happens to be my latest design in Baah yarn ! Perhaps I should share some of my WIPs today since I posted my only FO on WIP Wednesday?! Alas, the only WIP I can safely blog about is one that I started over the weekend with some handspun yarn. I needed something simple to knit at the bar, so a chunky garter project on size 13 needles seemed like the obvious choice. I'm planning to make a rather long scarf which has buttonholes on one end, allowing me to convert it into a long cowl if I'm in the mood. I'm using the hand-dyed Falkland handspun I made during Spinzilla earlier this year, and it's delightful to work with. Incidentally, there is a  Craftsy Yarn Fl...

I've made some pretty good progress on my Spooktacular Socks from Rohn Strong's Holiday Crochet Sock Club : Since these are my first-ever crocheted socks, I have no idea what to expect. I'm a little nervous about the fit (I admit, I didn't gauge beforehand - I like to live dangerously), but I'm learning a lot of new crocheting skills along the way, which makes it all worthwhile. The second clue for the Blissful Cowl Mystery KAL comes out today, so here is a spoiler photo of Clue 1. I was able to knit through the entire first clue in one evening, so you could definitely join in at this late date and get caught up fairly quickly!  Finally, I am making lots of little amigurumi bits and bobs as I kick my holiday gift-making into high gear this month. I probably won't be sharing the specifics till the end of December, but here is what my WIP basket looks like this week: Thanks for joining me this week! For more WIP Wednesday inspiration, visit the  ...

(Apparently I'm writing all of my blog headlines this week as though they are campy movie titles...) I have spent a lot of time working on two sweaters that haven't been mentioned in quite a while on this blog - the first is the Fieldwork Cardigan , which I seamed late last week and began the arduous task of knitting the edging over the weekend. On the plus side, all of the many ends are woven in from alternating skeins as I knit, so I'll just have a few ends to contend with when it's all said and done. Here's a shot before I started the edgings - it's looking so sweater-like! For those of you who are fans of PomPom Quarterly , you can now preview all of the patterns from the fall issue on Ravelry. Yet again, there are some really gorgeous designs; I don't know how they do it, but this is fast becoming my #1 favorite knitting magazine. It may be pricey to order the print copy, but it's totally worth it ( click here to read my review of Issue 5...

Over the weekend, I met my goal to finish the first sweater piece for the Fieldwork Cardigan : Of course, unblocked, it just looks plain weird, but that is the sleeve and one half of the back of the sweater. The pattern is from the new Pom Pom Quarterly (you can read my recent review here ) and I'm using some gorgeous hand-dyed yarn from the Sincere Sheep ! I visited family over the weekend and made some major progress on my Freia Cowl . It's now at that difficult-to-photograph phase, which means I am very close to being done: Finally, Tyler and I went to the a free show downtown (Speck Mountain and Sharon Van Etten) on Monday night, which was the perfect time to work on my Baah! socks . I even got the heel turned and made it nearly all the way through the gusset shaping: Tyler took some really cool photos at the show - the show took place in the Pritzker Pavilion , which was designed by Frank Gehry and is pretty cool to look at, much less sit in and enjoy music....

Happy WIP Wednesday! I have a few knitting projects to share this week, plus a progress report on my latest Spin-O-Lution efforts. First, my Elfe sweater is coming along nicely! Over the weekend I tried it on and decided to do a few more increases for the sleeves before binding off those stitches. Now that I have a bit of length from the armholes, I may have to try it on again just to make sure I made the right call. I finally started working on my second Fleece Artist sock - I'm not too far along, since I keep getting distracted by gift knitting/crocheting and my Elfe-in-progress, but hopefully I can get this second sock finished by the end of May so that the new pattern can come out mid-summer. That is the new goal, anyway! So what do I do when I have a self-imposed deadline? Cast on for a new hat , of course! My husband bought me some Knitter's Pride Karbonz needles for Christmas and I have been dying to knit with them. I have no idea why it took me five mont...

I'm still chugging away at my thrummed mittens , though over the weekend I started running perilously low on thrums. I probably should have seen that coming, but at least I have plenty of fiber to make more thrums....I just hope that I can get two mittens' worth out of them, since the first mitten is probably going to take over 200 thrums! I started a very simple hat last week which has been my primary on-the-go project. The pattern is a free pattern from Kelbourne Woolens called the Genmaicha Hat . I have to say that the name is really what did it for me, since it's my favorite kind of tea (though I am also in love with Canopy Fingering ). I happened to have some leftover yarn from my Color Affection Shawl - a full skein of Canopy Fingering in Sarsparilla and half-skein in Conifer; I did have a brief moment of insanity where I thought I should purchase one more skein to knit the teeny-tiny stripe before the ribbing, but then I realized I had enough Malabrigo Finito in...

Today's post will be a short one, because I have finished a few projects and been concentrating the rest of my crafting time on the Breezy Bolero . I actually did end up ripping the entire thing out and starting over - I don't know what compels me to do such things, to be perfectly honest. Whatever the reason, I'm glad I did because the issue I was bothered by is significantly better on this second attempt. With the progress I made over the weekend and these last few days, you probably wouldn't have known that's what I did if I hadn't just confessed, am I right? Click here to see last week's progress for comparison's sake! At any rate, last night I took off for the sleeves, and now I just have a few inches of stockinette and decreases to do before I get to the ribbing and bind off. My somewhat-unrealistic goal is to have ALL of the knitting completed by the end of this coming weekend. I suppose anything is possible, but considering I am (usually) t...

Destashing is the name of the game these days! I have been listing more of my stash for sale here on Ravelry in my efforts to streamline my craft room and reduce clutter around the house. In the spirit of these endeavors, I decided to join in the fun of the FreshStitches Scrap-a-Long , which gets rolling tomorrow! I used Stacey's excellent Russian join tutorial to create my very own magic ball using various red, white, grey and brown worsted yarns (including my leftover Sock Monkey yarn!). Then it was time to decide which pattern to use - after much debate, I decided that a cute monster would be the perfect project, so I'll be making  Mixtro the Monster , which is a free crochet pattern from FreshStitches on Ravelry! Also in the spirit of destashing, I I chose three colors of leftover sock yarn to start Tanis Gray's Constitution Hall Scarf from Capitol Knits . It's going to be three colors (I think), with one half of the scarf being light and dark grey and the ...