handmade by stefanie

Last weekend, I finished this adorable Flamingo from the FreshStitches Kit Club! Isn't he cute? You'd never know that winter has arrived here in Chicago - I managed to find the one part of our back yarn that hasn't yet died for the season! I also finally found a frame for my Excelsior , which was my TSOLKAL project. Now it's hanging in my craft room, where it coordinates with the curtains almost perfectly. I think it needs a few friends, but that will have to wait til I'm done with my holiday gift-making, of course. Speaking of holiday gift-making....the Indie Design Gift-along is here! Click here for all the details over on Ravelry, but in a nutshell, the GAL (as it's commonly referred to) is a great way to support indie designers while also saving money on your pattern purchase and having opportunities to win some amazing prizes ! Participating designers will be offering selected designs for 25% off with the coupon code GIFTALONG2014 . Look f...

The results from Spinzilla 2014 are in! Congratulations to Team Fancy Tiger Crafts, who defended their title well and won the golden niddy noddy for the second year in a row with a total of 171,492.6 yards. I'm pleased to say that Team Louet came in third place with a total of 156,852.920 yards. My own total turned out to be 3,404 once I'd added in the leftover singles from all of my Spinzilla projects, putting me in the Monster Mile club along with 881 other spinners; you can see all of my finished Spinzilla yarns  here on last week's post . Click here to check out the rest of this year's Spinzilla results! Yesterday I came down with a bug and was out of commission for most of the day, and now I'm scrambling to get caught up on work and chores before I head to KC for a friend's wedding this weekend. It's amazing how much losing just one day can throw things off! I thought about not posting a blog today at all, but in the end decided I could spare ...

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...