It’s been a few weeks since I’ve blogged about my crafty world. Last weekend I went to a conference and afterwards surprised my mother by showing up at her Mother’s Day brunch, and the weekend before was a quiet weekend at home.
I finally finished the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece, and it’s a great sweater-dress on her right now. I think she could get 2 years’ worth of use from this, this year as a dress, next year as a sweater:
And then I realized I had a friend with an impending baby to be born and I hadn’t made anything, so I quickly whipped up the Hoot Cardigan, which I saw Lucy Lee knitting at her weekly knitting group at Mind’s Eye Yarns now with an online store too! (note, I bought the grasshopper sky sock yarn a few weeks ago and still am in love with it) and I knew it would be perfect for the newest arrival in my tribe:
I have been working a bit on photography skills, and part of what I have learned is to not have anything directly on a background, because that will produce shadows that may skew the object a bit. The best thing to do is have the object hanging vertically somehow, and shaped (see how the Hoot Cardigan is done above?). So, in order to actually accomplish this for socks and gloves, I bought a plastic hand and clear plastic foot online. The foot looks very nice with the one completed Monkey Sock I’ve done:
Compare and contrast that with the pictures on my project page and you’ll see hands-down the plastic foot is the way to go.
Of course, this prompted my partner to tell me I had to stop buying body parts online.
I am currently working on the second Monkey Sock, so soon I will actually have a pair to wear!
I finished weaving the Spunky Eclectic Weaving Club April offering – the “This Way and That” scarf:
I need to work on not beating so hard – I learned that I should only beat once, but as my friend and amazing weaver Anna Branner says, “beating is more like placing the yarn.” So, I know that for next time!
With all this traveling I’m doing, I’m trying to knit while traveling and spin while at home (I’m bringing my spindles on the longer trips). So last night I spun up the Gnomespun Mythic Fiber Club Heqet I received earlier this month. The Manx Loaghton spun like a dream, although there is a very obvious “right” end and “wrong” end. I deliberately spun this thick, instead of my usual fine stuff, and then plied 2 strands together. The 4 oz bump yielded 3 3/4 oz of yarn, 172 yards at 7 wpi. It is soft and squishy and downy.
I also practiced playing around with my camera’s ISO settings. This first pic is on the highest ISO setting, 1600, which is good for very dark indoor scenes:
And here it is at the lowest ISO setting, 80:
It’s still way too sunny out to take the perfect picture, but I was not going to wait until the sun was at a different angle to take the picture. Note how the yellows are very washed out in the top picture.
That’s what’s been going on in my crafty world!
