A Pretty Neat Trade!

I hinted in my last post about trading some Mary Maxim kits and a good chunk of my acrylic stash. I traded it for a knitting machine! A Bond Elite to be precise.

Last night hubby helped me set it up and I stayed up til 2am using it. In 4 hours I got it set up, cast on 120 stitches and knitted 70 rows. But I kept dropping stitches and I could not get the hang of it so I ripped everything out and went to bed.

I spent a good portion of today getting used to the machine. I have knitted 325 rows, 120 stitches each. I have been using my dwindling acrylic stash to practice with and am making a particularly ugly striped blanket. It is so much fun!

You have to push this thing across this other thing (pretty technical huh) and you have to do it smoothly and slowly. You also have to keep slack on the working yarn. The acrylic I am using is very rough and it keeps snagging on everything so I haven't been doing a good job keeping it slack. I keep losing stitches on the edges. But it is happening less frequetly and I am getting faster at fixing it.

Well, I had better get back to my little experiment...

Cali

Its a new year.

Happy New Year Everyone!

I have been setting myself annual goals and tracking them on my Ravelry profile page. I achieved success in about half of last years goals. This year my goals are:

1. Make me a sweater.
2. Finish my sampler skirt.
3. Finish a lace project.
4. Finish the Harry Potter Scarf.
5. Make 4 Mother Bear Project Bears.
6. Sell/Trade the Mary Maxim Cat Afghan and Rug kits.
7. Blog at least twice per month.

So since January is more than half over I thought I better get a blog done or I will have failed my blogging goal before the first month is even over. I have already successfully completed one goal; trading the Mary maxim cat kits. I traded them for something really cool, but I will save that for my next blog post.

I have been working pretty steadily on my sampler skirt, it looks like I will need 1 skein of sock yarn per gore so I picked 4 more skiens out of my stash. Right now I am working on the second gore and doing it in the CCR colourway. I am absolutely thrilled with the results so far but it is an awful lot of brainless knitting.

The exciting part of this blog: NEW YARN! I bought my first handspun this month. I bought a beautiful 2-ply merino from SeeJayneKnit. It has shades of brown and gold with a bit of teal. Beautiful!

I also bought some single ply corriedale handspun from another etsy seller, MySweetSpot2. She listed a fabulous auction of 5 skeins that all coordinate, 2 multi coloured and 3 solid coloured. I just love these yarns! I have been stalking her shop looking for more of these sets.

While surfing, I stumbled across a neat yarn club. It is a sample club for the Elann.Com clearance yarns. Every month they send you a small sample of the yarns they will be clearing out plus little snips of all the different colourways. I received my samples yesterday. They are so cute! I am determined to figure out some kind of teeny project to make them into, There is about 20grams of yarn total so I cant do much with it, I am thinking maybe a coffee cup sleeve, or maybe saving several months worth and making a crazy scarf...

The fuzzy dead-muppet yarn is soft but I cant imagine ever wanting to knit something out of it, the tweedy looking one has a sparkly strand of lame in it so it is quite pretty, the dark brown yarn is a beautiful merino and the yellow is cotton blend. None of these are really calling out to me to buy so I think my credit card will be safe in February.

'til next time...

Cali