handmade by stefanie

I used to think of duplicate stitch simply as a way to avoid intarsia, but it's also a great technique for weaving in your ends invisibly, especially in colorwork projects. Earlier in the year, I knit the Very Important Villager hat in two naturally-dyed colors of Rambouillet yarn from Shepherd's Lamb . This breed-specific wool yarn has great stitch definition and lends itself well to colorwork: Fun fact: if you consistently hold one color below the other as you work, the colorwork motif will look crisper (this is known as color dominance ). Plus, the wrong side will look just as lovely as the right! If you're new to duplicate stitch, here is a great tutorial video from Very Pink Knits . I think of it as a 3-step process: you start by bringing your yarn up in the middle of the stitch BELOW the one you want to duplicate, then behind both bars of the stitch ABOVE the stitch you are duplicating. You return the yarn through to the wrong side the same way you starte...

Being a handspinner has its perks: you can create the exact yarn you want in terms of fiber content, color, and structure, provided you have the proper skill and materials. If you don't spin, you have to rely on the yarns you find in shops and at fiber festivals, which means that you can't always get your hands on a specific fiber, especially if it happens to be rare. The good news is that yarn producers are starting to get hip to the whole breed-specific thing, and now there are all kinds of unusual yarns and blends available to folks who might otherwise not encounter them outside of a fiber festival. Over the years I've enjoyed exploring specific breeds of sheep, from Polwarth to Gotland and all points in between. Last year, I purchased some Shetland batts at the Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Festival from Whispering Pines , a small farm in Wisconsin that raises registered Shetland Sheep. My fiber came with a photo of their sheep and some stats on the specific one who...

Not too long ago, I was sent a lovely box of yarns from Antonio and Molly Manzanares of  Shepherd's Lamb , a family-owned and -operated ranch in New Mexico. They raise a flock of Rambouillet and Navajo-Churro sheep to make organic their organic yarns which are processed and spun in the USA, then hand-dyed with low impact or natural dyes on site. I've never worked with Navajo-Churro before, so I gravitated towards these 6 colors and decided to do a gamp-style woven scarf (for any curious non-weavers out there, here is a great definition of a gamp ). The mix of natural/undyed yarns and naturally dyed colors was really fun to work with, and I have enough yarn left over to each one which I can use in future projects. Now that i know how each color interacts with one another, that will make choosing colors a lot easier ( click here to see what colors of Navajo-Churro yarn they currently have available ). I'm guessing that many of my readers have not worked wi...

I've been a non-participating member of the Spin Your Stash group on Ravelry for many years, but I think the time has come to quit lurking and be a joiner! My spin-o-lution this year is simple - to spin through my stash. Last week, I took stock: 1. Multicolor Merino Roving , 6.6 oz - purchased at the Yarn Barn of Kansas 2. Natural Black Alpaca Roving , 4 oz. - purchased from New Era Fiber at Stitches Midwest 3. Charcoal 70/30 Alpaca/Silk Blend Top , 4 oz. - purchased from Spunky Eclectic 4. Natural Cream Finn Top , 5 oz. - purchased from Spunky Eclectic 5. Dyed Falkland Top (Cloudy Night colorway) , 4 oz - purchased from Pumpkinhaus booth at YarnCon 6. Natural Merino/Silk Fiber , 4.75 oz - can't remember where this came from! 7. Red Alpaca Top , 6 oz - originally purchased from Spunky Eclectic in a natural cream, dyed by me back when I still worked at Lorna's Laces. 8. Light Brown Romney Top , 4 oz - gifted by a friend 9. Dark Brown BFL Top , 6 oz - purchased ...

Ever since I pledged my first project on Kickstarter to help The Wool Dispensary get started, I've been hungry to find and fund more interesting projects via the site. Late last year, my band successfully raised funds to release the first two 7" vinyl singles in a 4-single series, so I know how hard people have to work to meet their funding goals - it's definitely not easy! Last year, I funded a project by my poster-making friends Nick and Nadine of Sonnenzimmer  to help them create and print a book of their work. It just arrived in the mail at the beginning of this month; it's so exciting to physically hold the finished product in your hands and know that you played a small part in that object becoming a reality. Last year, I also funded a local brewing start-up (which culminated in a beertastic brewery tour right before Christmas), a graphic novel called the Intrepid Girlbot , and a gorgeous quarterly magazine for crafty folk by Susan Gibbs and Jeannie Bloch c...

In this free Craftsy class by Deb Robson, co-author of the Fleece & Fiber Sourcebook, you'll learn how to pay attention to the fiber content of the skein of yarn you're holding. As Deb notes in the introduction, lovely-hued yarns can often distract us from the characteristics of the yarn's fiber.  If you want to be satisfied with your finished project (not to mention have it last a long time), it's important to examine the fiber beneath the color. In the introduction, Deb covers the basics, sharing the four categories she uses to approach any new wool she comes across (fine, medium, long and double-coated). There are thousands of breeds and types of sheep; when working on her book with Carol Eckarius, they identified 125 breeds of sheep 'reasonably available" to english-speaking fiber folk alone...the book itself contains more than 200 breeds, but if they had keep going from there, it would have never been completed! Following the comprehensive int...