Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Fibre and yarn, and more yarn, and some socks...

Mister postman has been soo kind to me lately! It seems like every other day, something interesting has magically appeared in my mailbox. Really, I have no idea how this happens. Suddenly, all this fibre and yarn arrives at my doorstep, and I can't seem to make myself remember that I actually ordered and paid for this... ;)

This is merino superwash wool from Crown Mountain Farms

And this is my extremely pathetic first attempt at spinning it. Spinning is a lot of fun, and relaxing, but the result... not so much fun. It's lumpy and much too thin at the same time, and kind of looks like the dog ate it and spat it out again.


Moving on to nicer things. I've been trying to find the perfect shawl yarn for a long time, and whadda ya know, I found it right here in Finland! I don't really know how to describe it, because I couldn't possibly do it justice. But it's soft, smooth, the perfect thickness (or thinness), and it's cheap! It's Wetterhoff Silvia


Some Colinette Jitterbug has also appeared here, somehow. The colors are Copper Beach and Lapis, from Cucumberpatch


Unfortunately, there was a sale at Cucumberpatch, and they made me get this too! Rowanspun 4-ply. Dirt cheap!


And finally, some Lorna's Laces Shepherd sock, colors Sand Ridge and Aslan. These will be manly socks when they grow up. I found these at Garnkorgen


I also participated in Socktopia's Knit Off madness this weekend. It was a lot of fun, but I'm still bummed about the time difference. You see, we were divided into two teams and the team with the most finished socks (pairs) after about 2 days of knitting won. There was also an award for fastest knitter, i.e. the knitter who first finished a pair. And this is where the bummedness comes in. The contest started at 6.45 pm finnish time. I was knitting like a madwoman and finished my first sock in record time. But then, night time got in the way of knitting and I had to go to sleep. That's reasonable, you might think, but that meant that the knitters that live in the western US, for example, still had many hours of knitting left while I was sleeping. So the conclusion is that I had no chance of winning the fastest knitter award, which was what I was really aiming for with this competition. Well, no, the conclusion is actually this: I'm a really bad loser!!! :) But, anyway, here are my Knit Off socks. The pattern was made especially for the Knit Off by Momma-Monkey (our ring leader), and it's called Eleanor. I'm really happy with the way they turned out.

2 comments:

Fiber-4-U said...

The time difference was really crazy if you take into consideration I am actually in Hawaii, a good 6 hours difference from the East Coast to begin with !!

But WOW, I seriously thought you would have been first, you were going a long so quickly !!

I'm glad you played, next time I'll work somehting out with a better time consideration !!

Elaine said...

Haha. You're allowed to have a whinge about the Knit Off! I started at 3am in Sydney Australia and just couldn't hack it!

Oh, since you're in Scandinavia, can you recommend some yarn shops? We're visiting Sweden, Norway and Denmark later this month! Email me at erainelau (at) gmail (dot) com