Bead 'Splosion

Welcome to what my desk looks like right now! Mess, mess, and more mess, but productive mess. I'm on a beading binge, making things that will hopefully be for the etsy/artfire shop.

I was going to have a prospective June 1st opening, but let's be realistic - mid June sounds a little less rushed and crazy. The only rush to open the shops is to actually have them open; basically, it's solidified as "nothing is going to spontaneously do it for you, you need to just get your ducks in a row and keep pushing forward". So that's what we're doing.

Beaded things, art things, knitted things, doll things... whee! Here's just a little sneak peek:

Do you knit for the Alliance or the Horde?

What's this?

I was exempt from posting yesterday because of Root Canal. =P Root canal dental work trumps everything, and I spent most of the day on the couch, eating applesauce and taking ibuprofen. Not as bad as it's made out to be, but it leaves you sore afterwards.

Fortunately, today I woke up free of pain, mouth feels normal, and it's a long holiday weekend! I wonder what the cat is doing on a long weekend....

Things that make you go hhmmMMmmmm! More on this next week!

What's on the Wheel

Haven't been spinning much lately, too many other things to do. However, I banged up my right shoulder, which put a stop to things like knitting and beading. Spinning, however, doesn't take much shoulder motion, and my chair is nice and high backed so I could brace myself. Back to spinning it is!

This is what's on the wheel right now. I wish I could tell you what it is, but honestly, I have no clue. The Cat Mom, on hearing her kitten had taken up spinning, sent me a Box 'o Roving - no labels, no clue what fibers they are, just random colors Mom liked. Some of them were rough, at least two were completely unspinnable (I suspect they were for felting) and some of them were soft and fluffy and wonderful. 

So I arranged them in orders where the colors looked nice together, and started spinning!

It's - mostly - a nice thin single. And I've spun enough of it that at this point the bobbin is so heavy that my little Ashford Kiwi doesn't really want to take up the yarn right any more. The plan is that my Dragon will knit the Cat Mom a hat out of it, and for a hat you need yardage, so the colorful mix needs to be plied with something else and not to itself.

It's all so colorful and bright I decided it needed something darker and sort of neutral to offset it. Digging in the roving stash, I came up with BlueMoonFiberArts Blackbird colorway, in superwash merino. 

 

Which looks much lighter than you'd expect as roving, but spins up beautifully dark with just some subdued hints of color. I'm hoping it'll ply with the colorful scraps and make them pop.

Now to spin a comparable amount of the Blackbird to go with the Random Roving! I have no real way to judge this except by guesstimating. I'm excited to see what it plies like, and how much yarn I end up with by the end of it.

Custom Yarn - Yarnia

Ever wished you could have a custom made yarn without having to spin it yourself? Pick your colors and fibers and just have yarn magically appear, no effort involved? Wouldn't that be awesome?

Yarnia, a little yarn shop in Portland, OR, has set out to do just that. This is the most innovative way of selling yarn I've seen, and my hat's off to them - both for the idea, and for a great product.

Internet advertising at work, and I found them utterly by chance while browsing Ravelry - they popped up in the little add window to the side and I said huh, wonder what that is, and clicked. What Yarnia does is provide completely customized yarns; at their online shop you can select your yarns by fiber content or color, up to six at a time blended into one custom yarn. The yarns you select are singles, and are combined together and wound onto a cone. You specify how much you want, and a little gauge tells you, with each single added to your cart, how bulky your yarn is going to be.

I wanted more lace to sock weight yarn, so I kept it to three singles per cone. This also influenced my fiber choices, as some of their singles are bulkier than others. Keeping to alpaca, silk, mohair, and the glittery shiny lurex, I whipped together a mardi gras purple-green-gold and a subdued but sparkly blue toned. Submit the order - under $10 for 400 yards each - and bam, done.

Less then a week later the cones arrived. Poof! Magic, and custom made yarn.

 

Aren't they pretty? The lurex is pure synthetic sparkle magic, and it's understated - it pops out in glittery bits when you knit it up with the rest. There's a thread of gold in the first one and a thread of aqua blue in the second.

Now, the only trick is that Yarnia's technique is to wind at an even tension onto a cone - it's just the singles laid out together. They aren't plied with each other, so there's no overall twist. You just pick it all up together and knit with it as one. Might seem a little awkward at first, but it's not bad, and I like the way the colors seem to wrap around each other and alternate with your stitches, so you get a variegated effect.

Now the eternal question... what should I knit with the new yarn? Hmmm.....

(Just a note of reminder - CatDragon doesn't get any kickback or kudos for product reviews, I'm just passing along fun and interesting things as they cross my path!)

Pattern Markers

I'm a cat of small attention span and even shorter short term memory. This is the inherent problem with multitasking - I'm doing so many things at any given time that I if I put something down to come back to it later I can't remember what I was doing.

Knitting patterns? Stitch patterns that require extended repeats over multiple rows? DOOM.

So for the two sweaters I have on the needles right now (one human sized, one doll sized) I made stitch pattern markers, decorative little things that help me remember where I am in the pattern, which double as the place marker for the start of the round.

Simple, yeah? The larger one just has decorative bead spacers and is meant to count every 10 rows (the number of rows between increases/decreases in the human sized sweater).

On the smaller one I didn't bother with spacers - it's charting a specific stitch pattern for the cable running up the center of the doll sweater. It's the OXO cable, where the plain rings are just knit as normal and the rings with the beads are the cable crossovers. The blue beads mean I should start with the "hold cable needle to the back" and the purple (fuschia) beads mean I should start with the "hold cable needle to the front". Blue = back, fuschia = front, and the little heart dongle at the end reminds me it's the XO hugs and kisses cable. Even on my least caffeinated and most braindead days I can remember that!

On row 2 of the stockinette between increases

The entire things took me an hour to whip up this morning, using jump rings (5mm and 7mm) and eye pins with assorted beads for the connector bits. Quick, simple, and now I know where I am in my patterns even if the knitting sits around for a month or two unworked.

On the first stockinette row after the first cable cross