Fabric from Friends

Among the lovely things I was given by friends while recovering from my recent surgery was a gift basket stuffed full of all sorts of goodies, including this lovely assortment of fabric. It was a gift from the members of my quilting circle – five wonderful women that I am honoured to have as friends.

These are half metre lengths of six coordinating fabrics, most of them from the Zen line by Makower Fabrics UK. They are beautiful, and I can’t wait to decide what to make with them.

They’ve also been giving me handfuls and ziploc-baggie-fuls of  selvage edges from various fabrics. This is because I became enthralled with the original and cool projects I was seeing on the Selvage Blog. I’ve amassed quite a nice collection of them, and decided today that I should iron them and organize them a little bit. So that’s just what I did.

I started with this:

which soon became this:

and which finally ended up as this:

All nice and tidy and ready to use. Now I just need to come up with a project for them.

It looks like I will have a lot to keep me sewing this summer.

Baroque in Blue

I did finally finish the first sock of this pair, previously shown in progress in an earlier post.

I’m quite happy with how it turned out, and it even fits. And I have lots of yarn left over, so I don’t need to worry at all about being able to finish the second sock. Always a nice treat.

Pattern: Baroque by Janice Kang, from the Fall 2008 issue of Knitty

Yarn: a one-off colour of Jennifer’s Sock Flock Sock Yarn from Holiday Yarns

Swift!

I’ve been neglecting you, dear blog, but I have a good excuse. My recent health issues have been getting in the way. I’ve been anything but swift lately. But I hope that it is pretty much over now, and I can soon resume crafting so I have something to blog about.

In lieu of knitting or quilting, I have been putting some of my time to good use. I’ve been winding skeins of yarn into centre-pull balls, using my new swift. My dear husband made this for me from some left-over bits of wood, a little hardware, and some clever design work.

And here it is:

It has adjustable pegs to account for different skein sizes, and it rotates on a lazy Susan base. Here is a close-up shot of the base:

You can see the rubber feet that keep it from slipping from the table when I pull on the yarn.

As you can also see from the above photo, the swift comes apart for storage. The four arms come off, and the pegs come out of the arms. The arms are numbered to make it easy to set it up again, to account for minor variances in manufacturing.

Here it is with a skein of yarn on it, so you can see what it looks like in use.

So, now it is far easier to change this:

into this:

I do wind balls by hand, so it is still a slower process than it would be with a proper ball-winder, but this is a whole lot better than trying to hold the skein across my knees and keep it untangled while I wind. That was becoming very frustrating. I am finding that more and more of the yarn I buy comes in skeins, so having an easy way to wind them is very helpful.

P.S. The yarn pictured above is Sea Wool hand-dyed sock yarn, from Fleece Artist.