More fun with Yarn

Here is the Dragonfly Fibers/Sanguine Gryphon booth. Note my New Fabulous Gorgeous Sign with it's lovely and talented designer, Gryphon. She is fully decked out in her festival clothes, of course.

As is often the case, i was too busy having fun with yarn to actually even remember my camera, much less use it. luckily, Elizabeth was ready with hers and has graciously allowed me to lift these pictures from her flickr. i may have in fact borrowed one from pugmamma too.

Above is me and one of my favorite fiberistas, Steph of loop. it was great to see her and talk future "business deals", involving fleece washing and dyeing, one of my very favorite fibery pursuits. We may need to get together and have a big business meeting and, you know, bring our spinning wheels:)

And here is Jess, Grand High Counselor of this year's yarn party. Silliness aside, she and Paula Woolarina along with a few assistants and lots of awesome volunteers organized this event and did a truly great job. The space was terrific and even on a gray, drizzly day there was plenty of light. the location was central for the area and there was plenty of parking. Apparently, we had twice the number of people attening as last year, which may have accounted for my sales doubling. yay!

Doesn't entirely make up for the $350 parking ticket i was awarded for my cleverness in parking my car in a clearly marked handicapped parking spot while unloading, but it does ease the pain a bit. It's always worse when you really can't blame anyone but your boneheaded self. Oh, note the yummy merino-silk roving around Jess's neck. Handpainted by me.

I met and visited with many of the great yarnies in the Washington-Baltimore area. Here is Ang of Serendipitous Ewe. Good lady. She's clearly doing something right becasue her husband always comes to help her and her three little tiny boys were there to see mommie' show.

And note the handspun vest from roving purchsed at the booth from Maggie's Farm in New Jersey. I think she may be coming to Maryland Sheep and Wool, too. yay! The felted bag is also a Dragonfly original dyed, knitted and felted by me.

This fun with yarn happened at a spin-in at Lauren's house. We carded and core-spun, and plied our little hearts out.

I brought a giant batt to share. Kim briefly disappeared under it

but was able to escape. It is clearly carded to be a quilt batt given to me by my friend Maggie who received it from another friend. I tried some flat felting and some needle felting, inspired by this squishy, bouncy, cushy jacob batt. yum!

Homespun Yarn Party Blog Contest and MORE!

We're having a contest to help promote the event. Prizes include this lovely handspun yarn, a set of Ravelry-themed stitchmarkers, and perhaps a few other goodies to be announced later.

Here's what you need to do to enter:

1. Write a post about the Homespun Yarn Party on your blog between now and March 14 at 12 PM EST.

2. Leave a comment here (on the HYP blog) with a link to your blog entry, so we know you've posted. Be sure to give us a way to contact you if you win!

3. At the event, we will draw at least two winners from among the contest entrants.You don't need to attend to win, so even people who can't make it to the party can have fun with us!

While you're at it, if you’d like to link to the Yarn Party blog on your blog sidebar, here are some buttons you can use (right click on the image and click “save image as” to save it to your computer and then upload it to your own server space).

I'm busily working hard on getting ready for the Yarn Party. Dyeing, skeining, and tagging, oh my! Also, hoping to split some skeins up into mini toe and heel skeins for the give away goodie bags for the first 100 customers.

Meanwhile, I'm learning all the in's and out's of the girl scout cookie sale. who knew it was all so complicated! To get extra cookies for bookie booth sales at your local grocery store, one must make a deposit to one of the Council's many bank accounts, and then one must drive to a local cookie depot to pick up extra cases of cookies using the deposit slip as currency. Sadly, the entire National Capital area has run out of Girl Scout cookies until the bakery in Kentucky bakes and delivers more. Wow! Anyone have any extra lemon cremes or thin mints?

During the merchildren's swim practices, I have been steadily knitting the boy's pirate hoodie. Once i had completed much of the body, I noticed that it was narrower than i'd intended. Not narrower than the boy, who was re-measured and determined to be 27" around. Bit not as wide as he'd like it to be. I decided to knit 2" wide gussets to give the body extra width and performed my very first steek in order to insert them under the arms.

I considered using crochet steeks, but felt they'd acc extra bulk under the arms. So I pulled out my poor lonely sewing maching, threaded it with pink thread, and sewed reinforcing lines two stitches apart. Super narrow, yes, but the idea is to add width here and I've never been a wimp:)

I went ahead and cut the steeks right away and sewed the gussets in using mattress stitch. So far, the stitches appear to be holding. When i finish the knitting, I'll probably reinforce the steeks again with a second line of machine stitches along the edged of the steeks. This is the boy child we are speaking about!