handmade by stefanie

Last weekend, I started my first class project from the Craftsy class I'm taking (full review will be forthcoming!) I'm using leftover bits and bobs of yarn to make a long scarf, and I was so excited about it that I wound the stick shuttles two weekends ago while I was waiting for the heddle I needed to arrive. The idea is that it will be gradient-ish from black to blue to green to grey for the weft. Once the heddle arrived and it came time to warp, I had an idea: why not make a gradient-ish warp, too? The thought entered my head and stayed there when it came time to warp the loom. Apparently, I was feeling very experimental and devil-may-care last weekend, because I went all-in and decided to use....five colors?!Not only that, but they were all different kinds of yarn, and as you can imagine, that produced some interesting tension issues to start things off. But this wacky little experiment isn't all for naught: so far, my favorite of all of the warp yarns is...

This weekend, my pal Lauren and I went to YarnCon , Chicago's independent fiber festival that features several local and regional indie dyers, spinners, and other fiber-related folks. This year, they are kicking off the fiber festival season (at least for me), rather than waiting til the fall - a clever move, since there are already many fibery events in the region from August-October (Stitches, Wisconsin Sheep & Wool Festival, Michigan Fiber Festival and VK Live all come to mind). Their new venue in the west loop is a little roomier, too, boasting plenty of parking; another exciting development for this year's show was moving to a two-day format! I had a small budget which I managed to stick to, amazingly enough. There were many temptations, of course, but in the end I made just a few purchases: a skein of Seda Sock from the Grinning Gargoyle booth (in Signature Red to coordinate with the Espresso Seda Sock yarn I purchased at VK Live last fall), some hand-dyed organi...