New features in this blog!

While I'm not ready for an entire blog redo yet (Joanne over at ready, set, craft! as well as a few others have been doing some major blog remodeling- it looks great Joanne!) I have added a few new features.

• 1st I added a new gadget- the search feature (located at the top of the right-hand column). It's so cool! Go ahead type in a word- like knitting or baby or lemon- and boom just like that it shows you anything I've posted with that word. Cool!
  

• And 2nd- I've gone through all my posts and added labels (something I should have been doing from the start but really didn't think about).
  

Hopefully this is a step towards making my blog not only more organized for myself but easier to navigate for readers. Hooray!

Baby Sweater Finished!

I hesitated to post this until I had the sweater in the mail. (I think it arrived just in time for baby Lia to be born!)

Now that the sweater there- I wanted to share the results. (Sorry the pictures are a bit dark- it was late when I took them.)

Happy Friday!

As the spindle turns: Episode One

So my crafter's block is broken!! As suddenly as it came on- it went away (thankfully) and my mind is chock full of things I want to do. This weekend, while buying supplies for my upcoming wheel spinning class, I also bought a drop spindle, some fiber, and a nifty book about spinning.

I practiced with the spindle and actually got something resembling yarn (amazing). Since all fibers are different- on the advise of a helpful webs employee I bought a little bit of a few different kinds to test.

The brown one is domestic wool- this seemed easy to work with but wasn't my favorite both for the look and the feel (to be honest the colors offered are very drab and it feels scratchy).

The purple one is Mohair- this was pretty easy to work with and I liked the results.

The black one is Alpaca- while I loved the feel of it, I had some problems prepping it to the right size consistently and it fell apart more often than not. (But take all of these reviews with a grain of salt- it's only the second time I've ever even held a spindle- I know nothing.)

The white one is silk- it felt just like a cloud, I wanted to make a big pile of it and nest there. This was probably the easiest to spin- and gave the best results. Although I'm not sure if that's because it was the fourth one I tried and I had more practice or if it was because of the fiber.

It's all one ply because my attempts at anything more than that failed miserably. It turned into me wrestling with two very long stands of fiber that were winding uncontrollably into knots, then (once the knots were out) instead of each ply spinning together to form a 2 ply yarn- they just unspun themselves and never stuck together. Really a mess.
I like using the spindle a lot- but I can't shake the idea that I'm doing something wrong because it seems too simple. I am by no means good at it yet- but the whole process just seems too simple. It's like- here take this piece of wood attach the fiber to it and spin it like a top and you'll get yarn.

Seriously there are a few more details but thats basically it. Now don't you feel like it's too simple too?

It just can't be real yarn- seriously you just whirl this around with fiber- and do a few other things to finish it off when your done twirling. And you get yarn.

I tried a bit of it and it actually has the nerve to knit up like real yarn too! Honestly I can't get over it.