Category Archive

Today I worked on TAST week 20 - Butterfly chain stitch.  It looks terrible.  I had an idea behind this, truly.  But it just didn’t pan out.  Perhaps it’s because I’m taking some drugs (prescription - don’t get worried)  that are making me really spacey today.    Perhaps they also affected my fine motor skills because I found it really difficult to line up the chain stitch in the right place whilst keeping the line it’s forming from one stitch to another taut.  And so I will be mightily glad to move on from this stitch.

About all I could do today was listen to one of my favourite podcasts, Stitch It, and wind a ball of wool on my home made nostepine i.e. a large knitting needle.  I do like this ball of wool though.  It’s spindle spun from two colours of merino top from Virginia Farm Woolworks.  It’s my first go at combining colours…I realise it’s not totally original but it was still fun. I have two more skeins to wind of about the same size.  It’s probably only enough for one scarf, but that’s ok, that’s alright, that’s fine…Ummmm do you see how spacey I am?  I don’t think there’s quite enough twist in this one.  I’ve been trying to ply a balanced yarn.  I am getting a bit better but it’s nowhere near perfect yet.  But it’s still fun, and that’s the main point of this, right?

I just had to play with it, I couldn’t help myself after buying a “cheap as chips” polymer clay book.  I’ve joined a couple of spinning groups on ravelry including “spindlemakers”.  I really  wanted to try a bottom whorl spindle…so why not make one, right?!  Several people had made theirs out of polymer clay so I thought I’d give it a go.  Mixing colours was a little difficult as I don’t think the primary colours are “true” - so mixing red and blue did not make purple.  But blue and yellow gave a nice green so maybe the problem was with the red?  Anyway, here’s the result…the shaft is a 99cent wooden knitting needle.

And it spins like a dream.  I was so suprised.  It doesn’t spin out a lot and it spins for a really long time.  The fiber is a wool/silk blend.  It’s a bit sparkly…both the fiber and the spindle.  I pressed pearlescent powder into the fimo before baking.

And since I was onto the fimo - I tried to make some canes.  Not perfect.  Not good enough for beads, but OK for stitch markers I think.