handmade by stefanie

As it turns out, my only FO for this week isn't ready to be revealed just yet! Instead, I'll be sharing a few highlights from my trip to Kansas City. Meet you back here tomorrow for another Tour de Fleece installment of Spinning Saturday!  We stayed with Tyler's parents, who had a fantastic view of the downtown Kansas City Skyline.  As luck would have it, my dad snagged a bottle of the hard-to-find Boulevard Coffee Ale for us to try! Speaking of dear old Dad, I let him try out my Zoom Loom! Here he is with his first woven square! No trip to KC would be complete without at least a few visits to Tyler's fave, Winstead's. ....or lots more tasty local beer! Though there isn't much photographic evidence, I managed to squeeze in plenty of knitting time. I also managed to spin every day that we were in KC, sometimes in the most unexpected places! For instance, here I am spinning on the lawn of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of art. ...

I took five projects with me to Kansas City; four FO's returned with me, and I started the fifth project on the train back to Chicago! I was halfway to the heel on sock #2 for the Jelly Beans Sock KAL before leaving for KC; about halfway through the train ride down, I realized I'd left the instructions at home . Genius! Luckily, I had sock #1 to use at a reference. I'm not terribly experienced with short-row heels, but I have to pat myself on the back and say I did a pretty good job with reverse-engineering sock #2, which was completed sans instructions. I can't tell which one is the off-book sock, can you? One note about the yarn ( Spinnery Sock Art - Forest  in Natural Gray): it bloomed quite nicely once I blocked it with a little Eucalan .  I'll have to give some of their hand-dyed colorways a try next! I know I shared a photo of my finished Tarragon Swan Cowl  earlier this week, but I wanted to share a photo with an actual humanoid (even if it is just m...

Today I'm back in Chicago after spending a long weekend with my husband and our families in Kansas City. We both needed a trip out of town that wasn't for business (or a family emergency). This mini-vacation was laid-back, filled with food, family, friends, knitting, and most importantly....BEER! Early on in the trip, I finished my Indigo Swan Cowl . It proved to be the perfect train knitting project - an easy-to-memorize pattern that I could absentmindedly knit no matter how tired I got. I used up pretty much all of the skein, too - after binding off, there were only a few yards left. the first day we were in town was my Dad's sixtieth birthday, so my mom and I treated him to lunch at Beer Kitchen. Our server brought him some drunken donuts for dessert and he was a pretty happy guy! We stayed with Tyler's parents downtown and took some time one morning to explore the historic graveyard that their balcony overlooks. I lived in Kansas City til I was 23 and neve...