Craftiness by Soft n’ Shiny!

Why hello “post” section of my blog.  I’ve ignored you for far too long.

For today, I bring to you a photograph.   I have begun to learn how to use my Drum Carder that I got for christmas.  My crafting level of crazy has escalated a lot since I last blogged.  I’m just going to jump in and post this.

Love! This batt is made of merino/silk that I dyed last summer and some pink firestar.

I’ve been dyeing yarn and making necklaces like mad for my first instalment of my very first club that I’m running, the Ladies of Who club.  Month #1 is inspired by the character Martha Jones.

I’m both nervous and excited to see how my club members will react to my Martha inspired necklace & yarn!

Hopefully I will blog more often.  I will try.  I’ve been rather scattered at times though.  So, we shall see.

Tags: batts, carding, club, martha jones

As a special needs mom, from time to time I need to refer myself back to this poem.  It helps me in times of need.

Welcome to Holland

by Emily Perl Kingsley.

c1987 by Emily Perl Kingsley. All rights reserved

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability – to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It’s like this……

When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip – to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland.”

“Holland?!?” you say. “What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.”

But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It’s just a different place. It’s slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around…. and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills….and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy… and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.”

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away… because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.

But… if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things … about Holland.

After I experimented with the bamboo crochet thread and the ice blue merino, I decided to go back on two previous attempts at spinning and ply them. I found plying helped get rid of some of my over-twist in the singles, and allowed for a more lofty wool.

I still haven’t plied handspun-to-handspun yet, both of these projects used 48%silk/52%wool combo lace-to-fingering weight wool I already had in the house.

The first skein I went back and plied was a skein of domestic wool I had dyed with Kool-aid, and then spun. I loved the way the colours were, but I learned that I don’t really care to spin with “domestic wool roving” as it’s simply not as soft as merino wool (as of right now I’ve only spun merino and domestic, although I have other fibers in my stash I can’t wait to try out).

This was that skein (clicking on the images will show you larger pictures!):

I really loved how this looked, and I’m going to attempt to make something similar again with the kool aid dyes, but with a different base.  I’m a bit sensitive when it comes to wool, and I found there was no way I could wear this on my skin comfortably.  Most people aren’t as sensitive as I am, but still.

I had a skein of this green-pink-yellow silk/wool in the house, and I figured the addition of green would be nice on this wool, so I decided to give it a go. 

The end result is a lovely boucle-style wool! I love how this turned out, even though I prefered the colour-scheme prior to the ply, this is a much better end result.  The plying undid some of my overtwist and it added air to this skein of yarn, making it so much more lofty.  The addition of softer wool/silk helped the texture; while I still would now prefer to not use domestic roving, I think I’ve saved this wool from the “stuff I won’t touch” pile.

The second (and third technically!) skein of wool I decided to ply was my Wine merino handspun.

Now, I had no real problems with this wool, it was soft and art-yarny with some of the overtwist in it.  However, I really liked the results in the other wool, so I mulled it over for a moment or two and decided to dive into this project as well.  I have this fingering weight 48%silk 52%wool skein in the house that matches the Wine merino almost perfectly, and it is aptly-named “Zinfindel”.  My best friend thought this was very appropriate and said if I did go forward with this project, I’d be creating “sangria”.

This took longer as I had two skeins of it, but the end result of the two together is amazing. I think I’m going to make myself a scarf out of this (though, I often say that, and still am using a scarf I threw together for myself back in 2008, despite my wool-addiction).

I can’t say enough how much I love this!  I’ve learned so much in my short time spinning, and there’s so much more to learn.  I’m definitely enjoying spinning; I haven’t had an opportunity to spin much in the last couple of days because of other commitments but once I get this entry up and a couple of chores done, I have some roving that has been waiting for me to get done!

I’ve been having a lot of fun dyeing wool with kool aid lately (note to self, write a post about that soon!), and I’ve begun to spin what I’ve dyed.

I had about 1oz of merino wool that I had dyed with ice blue rasperry kool aid that I spun up over the weekend into a single ply. At some point, I was perusing various ravelry threads (I would give credit if I could remember where I read the info, but it was late and I was surfing on the ipad in bed!) and someone mentioned a way to easily ply when you are using a hand spindle if you don’t have a spinning wheel. It involved tennis balls.

I acquired some tennis balls on Saturday afternoon and unsuccessfully utilized this strategy on Saturday evening. I wish I had taken a picture of the mess I made! It was like a spiral perm gone wrong when I realized my mistake and had to undo what I had done! When you spin fiber, you must remember when plying you spin in the opposite direction than when you spun the wool initially… and I forgot this rule! The end result was a bit of a nightmare, and I had a big ol’ mess on my hands!

So, I started again. I took a tennis ball, and wound the spun merino wool and some bamboo crochet thread onto it.

This time I spun in the CORRECT direction…

And eventually, I got all of it spun up!

I wound it up onto my niddy noddy:

And wound up with a nice skein of floofy merino & bamboo, that is as light as air.

Then I gave it a little bath in some eucalan & a rinse, and hung it up to dry.

Admittedly I didn’t ignore it as much as I should have throughout the day, of course I was changing how it was hanging, but I really could not believe how soft this skein ended up being, even while it was still damp. The next morning I had a nice skein of dried, fluffy merino that is definitely cuddly!

Unfortunately because it was from an experimental dye, there’s only 1oz of this beauty and it’s a pretty thick spin. I am still learning at this whole spinning thing, but I’m enjoying it very much. This experiment with plying has me going back and re-doing a couple of other skeins of wool I’d previously spun, just to lighten them up a bit. But that’s another post!

I haven’t been blogging for a long time, either on my personal blog or my craft blog.  I’ve decided I need to change this habit! I miss blogging, but sometimes life can get you so bogged down that you forget, or things that you enjoy become a chore.

I’ve grown so much as a crafter since I first started my online shop and my last year ended up a bit of a whirlwind where I wasn’t able to put as much energy into my shop as I had hoped I would.  Because I do so much of my crafting for personal relaxation and growth, however, I have learned so many other techniques, and have evolved with my crafting.  I find I’m more at ease with much of what I do, and while it is still an adventure to create new pieces, I have a lot more confidence in what I do.

In an effort to get myself rejuvinated for my craft blog experience, I have taken down all of my previous entries here.  It’s been more than a year since I last updated this blog, and there was only a handful of entries as it was, so it’s not a lot of history that I’ve removed.  Plus I just swapped them all to “draft” status, I didn’t really trash my history.

My two passions, “soft” and “shiny” are still rampant, but I find I am going through phases where it’s either one or the other in a feast-or-famine sort of way.  Currently I’ve learned how to spin my own wool, and in fact today I’m learning how to ply my own handspun. It’s very fun, albeit time consuming.   I am hearing some nagging in the back of my head, however, that I need to refocus my energy onto my jewlery once again because I’ve been muffling those sounds with a lot of fiber, and I have so many ideas that are in my head for the jewelry side of things, I don’t want to lose them!  Some days I wish I could clone myself and have some extra hands!

I’m in dire need of a shop revamp, and I’m working to that end currently.  I am on a new computer at the moment and I haven’t moved my photoshop over here yet so I do need to find my discs and get that done; it’s part of what is stalling my progress.  I want a new banner for my etsy and artfire shops, and I probably should get some sort of better avatar for my twitter feed!

Speaking of twitter, I know I got myself into some spam-issues there.  I am sure I have upset some people, but I recently went through my entire twitter “following” list, and I deleted out the majority of whom I was following.  I think I probably accidentally cut some people I didn’t intend on, but in my defence I was sick with a terrible cold at the time and keeping my focus wasn’t the best of things. 

I had got involved with an etsy team, and while it was very motivating to actually be part of a team, all it really did was create a massive amount of spam on twitter.  I think it was to the point where I had an automated twitter feed that would do a spam message every hour, and they weren’t even for my own shop! On top of it all, I was getting barely any tweets advertising my own shop in return; not to metion I was feeling very guilty for spamming people on my own twitter with so much advertising.

Thus, I decided to completely stop with the spam.  I’ve deleted most of my twitter (and of course, in return, I’m being deleted from many other people’s twitters, I’ve lost a ton of followers after doing this myself, which I totally can understand!).  I have vowed that my twitter feed will be 95% spam free (thus far since I’ve started back, I haven’t done any spam actually, but I wanted a bit of wiggle room!) and return to tweeting in a way that I enjoyed; having lots of fun tweeting with other people on a variety of topics.  Twitter was feeling like it was a bad chore, like LAUNDRY, and I really felt I was just irritating people with the constant stream of spam-tweets.

While initially I know this move has hurt me on the twitter front, I feel it will be a much better experience now that it’s not one big long advertisment that’s driving other people to unfollow me due to too much spam. I’m not against SOME advertising; i mean it’s social networking for a reason… but it was just too much and it caused me to ignore twitter for about 8 months!

At any rate, I am hoping to get myself back into a flow of things; I’d like to try and blog more often and just talk about my experiences, both good and bad, with my crafting.  Hopefully there will be more successes to report!

My long term goal is to have my shop in decent shape jewelry-wise by the beginning of May, and fiber-wise by the beginning of August.  I’m not really expecting to have a great income by my crafting; those delusions of grandeur are long-gone, but I wouldn’t mind it generating enough to support my crafting addiction!