Felted hats

First of all, double good news. The dog is taking meds and we are hoping we caught it early. Might of course result in pups at the end of the Summer, we'll see. And the other good news is that by accident I found my hat! :D cleaning up the bathroom I found this plastic bag with the hat in it! I have no clue why I put it in the bag or when I last wore it so it's all a big mystery. But the hat is back and I'm happy! :D

I took a few pictures at my LYS (well, FYS really) yesterday but I forgot to photograph the shawl. So I'll show you the knitted hats I've been experimenting with.

Last year I knitted this hat for my FYS-owner, as a New Years gift. I showed it to her and took it back as I wanted to embroider it. I finally did that not so long ago and I gave her the hat. Many people were so enthousiastic that I decided to try to make a few and sell them. I want to make them all different by decorating them in different ways.

First, the hat I made for my FYS-lady :

(more pictures at Flickr or at Ravelry!)

I love how this hat turned out, both the felting and the embroidery.

So I tried a green hat. It turned out quite ok though I don't remember how much yarn I used for the white hat and I think I need to use 2 strands in the future (the green hat is a bit finer and felted a bit smaller).

The hat is less sturdy then the white one but it looks the same when you wear it. I did some dry felting on the hat to decorate it but it's not as nice as I had hoped. It'll do though.

The third hat turned out way to small (which adds to the idea that I should double the yarn while knitting the hats). It's a baby-sized hat. I had also dyed the yarn myself and somehow the brown turned into a nice purple in the washing machine! :D Not to bad as a result.

I do think it felted nicely apart from the brim which would look nicer in my opinion if it didn't curl so much. I added some crocheted flowers which I think it nice for a little child!

Both the hats are for sale at my FYS. I have a few new ones in mind. Actually, I need to perfect them more. If it works out I might try a few more for next year, as over here Winter is already half way behind us. I do need to use the yarn double stranded and I think I did that with the white hat. I'll need to keep more notes on these. I also want to experiment a bit with different hats, but that won't be easy as I don't want to steal designs from someone (this design was vaguely based on one in a book).

I also want to experiment a bit more with the decorating of the hat. I love the embroidery of course. But I'm a bit stuck for designs. I need to try more of the dry felting, which I think I can improve in as well. I like the crocheted flowers, but I might try to felt some flowers in the future. We'll see.

I am hoping to at least support my fiber addiction in the future with what I'm making. Somehow I realized I want to be able to at least safe a little money, so maybe if I can make enough money from being creative to buy more yarn and fiber, I'll have some extra to safe!

As an opposite, I bought myself a new phone! The iPhone is still way to expensive so I bought a (cheaper) Nokia model with less possibilities but still a nice phone. I need to make myself a case for it so that I can remove the protection and maybe can takes some decent pictures with it!

More soon!

A new year!

Happy New Year to all of you, even though we're already half way through January. I can't believe it's already January. It's so strange!

I promissed myself I would try to post here at least once a week, or at least twice every month. With the amount of knitting I'm doing right now it shouldn't be a problem. But unfortunately so far I haven't been able to post here. The reason? It hasn't been a good start to the year. :( I started sick with stomach flue the first 3 days of the year, and it took me over a week to fully recover. I'm back at work and I'm still not happy with my job, especially not after another humiliating team meeting last Wednesday. I love working with the kids and if I could find a similar job I would be out of here in no time. But at the moment there isn't anything interesting available and I'm not to that point yet where I would leave here for any job. Then there are issues in my relationship. And then there are some issues with people I thought were my friends but I'm now seriously reconsidering that ... . So far I haven't had much luck with friends and I'm wondering if it's just me, or maybe my definition of friendship. And last there is - added today - a sick dog. And it's serious, not just "sick".

Actually, I'm ready to start crying and not stop. It's just to much. My knitting and fiber stuff is, at the moment, the only thing I have to escape. It still gives me the opportunity to forget everything and I like that!

Now one of the things I need to do to make me more excited to post here is get a better way of taking pictures. I don't post often as I'm not happy at all about the pictures I'm taking. I have a few favourites on Ravelry and they aren't honestly favourites just because of the knitting. Well, the super knitting is of course a plus, but I just adore the lovely pictures they are taking. I want that, but I never succeed. :(

Ok, on to the knitting, if you all are still around after all my complaining. I ended the year quite nicely by finally using my loom for the first time! I bought it back in December 2008 but it took me more then 6 months to put it together and well, 6 more to start my first project on it. I decided I wanted to make a scarf for my mother for Christmas, and I was going to use handspun. As soon as I thought it over I realized there was this hanspun in my stash that would be perfect. My mother likes bold colourse like red and yellow (opposite to me) and I remembered this yarn :

It's the Tulip Colourway from Spunky Eclectic (a club colourway). It's 100% BFL and I spun it hoping for sockweight yarn. It's more like sportweight and it was navajo plied. So I got 2 very different skeins which I probably would never knit into socks. But it was perfect for a scarf! Took me some time to decide between white or black for the warp, but I went with white heavy fingering weight yarn from a cone. And this was the result :

It's woven on a 7.5dpi, which is about all I can say as I'm pretty new to weaving :D. I also don't know the size of the scarf. I asked my mom to measure the scarf but I don't think she has done it yet. I forgot to do it before I gifted it, it was quite a close call to Christmas! :D

Now on the loom (only just warped the loom and wove a few cm, still need to do a lot but as my loom is in a spare bedroom I often just don't get there ...) :

It's all still very new for me so at the moment I'm just hoping on something "wearable". This is going to be a scarf for the boyfriend, yarn I bought ages ago to knit him a scarf but I will probably never get to it so I hope I'll weave it sooner!


I have been knitting a lot of hats lately. I'm truly addicted. I'll try to take a few pictures of the last ones I knitted and then post about them all, but there is one hat I want to show here :

It's the Spring Beret (it's a free Ravelry Download). I knitted it quite some time ago and wore it almost daily till just before Christmas. I loved it. Had to add some elastic thread as my hair was pulling it back but it was perfect. And then I lost it. Haven't seen it since the week before Christmas. I miss it! But I guess, as I haven't found it yet, that I truly lost it and that I won't find it again. :( I have no more yarn like this left, so it's sad. It's especially sad because I knitted a matching shawl out of the same yarn. My mom loves the shawl so I'm now thinking about gifting it to her and knitting myself a new hat and shawl. But this truly was a perfect yarn for this! Especially the shawl (of which I apparently have no picture ...), it was thick, warm and drapy!

Now, for Christmas I knitted socks for my family again. Of course I started to late and didn't get all the socks done. Still need to knit socks for my aunt and grandfather, and for my boyfriend. But well, I did get some socks done and maybe I'll get started sooner next year.

Top to bottom, left to right : grandma, sister #2, mother, sister #1 and uncle. The socks for my aunt are started, still haven't found the yarn I planned on using for my grandfather (cleaning up is never good for me!).

I now really need to start some baby knits. I wasn't planning on knitting for babies anymore as I know from experience most people really don't appreciate my gifts. But my mom asked for a knitted gift for the baby of a friends son, and then a friend of mine, who occasionally knits herself, just gave birth to a baby girl so I'm a bit torn if I should knit her something or not.

I'll leave you for now with a picture of my sweet sick dog (the best and most recent I could find) and a picture of the Winter we've been having (sadly it's getting warmer now and the snow has almost completely melted away ...)