Thursday, December 16, 2010

Celebrate a New Local Yarn Shop!

My good friend Shelley Stone and her partner Marissa Gibler opened a new yarn shop in Moscow, ID--Yarn Underground! Shelley, a great spinner, has been one of my spinning inspiration-ers! A couple of years ago, at a Woolgatherer's meeting, she let me try her wheel. Then she even plied the several yards I made and presented it to me. Most recently--just yesterday--I took my wheel into her shop along with some dyed superwash wool I bought from her a couple of months ago.

Decided I needed to try something other than my own alpaca for spinning. As an alpaca farmer, I wanted to start with and learn to spin alpaca. Now that I'm a little bit confident with the alpaca, I wanted to stretch out to something new. It seemed that with the superwash I was getting either too much spin or not enough.

Shelley worked with me a little at the shop, helped adjust the tension and assured me that I was not getting too much spin, and I think I've got it! The yarn will be a somewhat laceweight mixture of blues, greens, yellow! I'm planning on making myself a pair of socks.

Anyway, back to the yarn shop: Marissa is a great knitter, especially of children's clothing. Shelley has knit some yummy sweaters and she recently got into dying. Yesterday in her shop, she showed me a shelf full of new yarn she spun (from her own dyed fiber).

And, some of my alpaca yarn is on consignment at the shop. On display there will also be two of my knitted projects--I took in a new entrelac scarf I made with my own Big Meadow Creek Alpaca yarn and some Cascade Eco alpaca (that I really don't like that much--one-ply, feels more like a lopi--but it is soft). The scarf is "fancied up" with some crocheted corkscrew fringe--I should have taken a picture! I also took in a lace hat made with some of my four-ply alpaca.

Now that the Christmas season is coming to a close, I might get back to knitting something for myself. I started an alpaca sweater two years ago that is 80 percent complete! It doesn't look like much in this picture I took--I guess in the summer of 2008! Definitely time to get that project finished!