More Treasures from the Past and my Oldest WIP

 First off, the Lord of the Rings scarf made it to its proper owner. It has been dubbed his precious.

Now onto some very cool finds. In digging out our dining room I found an old box that made its way here via my mother's basement, and likely my grandmother's house.

This is my very first sewing box, and my first sewing machine! This My Little Pony machine is from the 80s and it's a chain stitch machine. You can see my little 5 year old writing there. In the boxe were two cut out Cabbage Patch Doll outfits, one dress, and one pair of overalls. These WIPs were 35 years old and now that I found them, I will finish them!

And since I also found my two Cabbage Patch Dolls in the box too, I cleaned them up, finished the overalls for Jesse Barfield (as I wanted to preserve his Blue Jays uniform), and passed them to my toddler. I still need to put the dress together, and I have some nice fabric scraps to make some more outfits with the pattern as well.

Sorry for the potato picture, but liberating him from my toddler for a proper photoshoot was proving difficult.

It's been fun going down memory lane back to when I was learning to sew with my grandmother.

FO: Fellowship of the Ring Scarf

 

So this is finally done! This is the Fellowship of the Ring Scarf (Ravelry link) by Ben Griffiths. 

This was a really fun knit. It is just the chart, not a full written out pattern, but it's a standard rectangle so it's not difficult to figure out.

The pattern is written for DK weight and double knitting, but it really could be done any weight of yarn and as colourwork rather than double knitting. As I stated in my WIP post about this project, I decided that since it will be going to someone in a quite warm climate, I was making something that would work better as a wall hanging.

This took me technically just over a year, but in that year I was pregnant and that always sucks any knitting mojo away. If I were to calculate actual time worked on this I would say it would take about 2 months around a full time job and 2 kids.

It's interesting looking at the pattern page and comparing my photos to see how the different weight yarn actually stretched the proportions of the image. Mine are all a bit wider looking, though that could also be my gauge, I'm a relatively loose knitter.

And now for some pretty closeups of the various motifs.

I'm really happy with this, though I learned that my purling is very different in gauge than knitting. If you look closely at the background it looks ridged. That's just a gauge thing, and something I'll have to see about working on in the future.

I think my friend will really like this and I'm looking forward to it getting to him.

Even baby steps are steps forward

 The organizing and tidying of the craft/office space continues. It feels like it's moving at a snails pace but there are other areas of the house we've needed to focus on. At this point all rooms are usable in the house except the dining room which has become our staging room. Everything in there either finds a place that is neat and away, or it leaves the house.

There's been plenty of garbage that has left the house, and a good amount of organizing of the boxes that are left.

The biggest move has been my office desk downstairs and all the craft boxes that are organized into the closet. Which currently looks like this.

There will eventually be shelves in there, but for now it holds the boxes very well, and even has space for both of my spinning wheels. I'm pondering putting the desk up against the wall and see what that does for my work space, the area is pretty small and my office setup takes priority over crafting as that's how I make the money to keep the house.

There is still a bunch of crafting stuff being dug out of the dining room that isn't organized yet, and it is taking residence in a corner of the living room until I can go through it and get it into the neat boxes like the ones currently in the closet.

At least it's not too big of a pile, and a bunch of it is fabric that can go into mattress bags or more storage boxes as I get them.

The main thing is that any progress is good progress and my goal is to have the dining room usable by the time Little Man is 6 month old and starting to eat solids. That way we can start establishing family dinner time with Munchie, who currently has her own little table in the kitchen, but would definitely benefit from having us all sit around a big table. 

Gift in Progress

 Sometimes a project comes along that must be done rather than wants to be done. The kind of project that you see a pattern and know that you will spend the next who knows how long to get it done.

This was the Fellowship of the Ring pattern (Rav Link), which is really just a chart to follow for a rather wide scarf. Once I saw this chart I knew that my coworker needed to have it.

Said coworker loves Lord of the Rings and usually reads through them at least once a year. Shortly before this pattern was released, he'd mentioned that due to a health issue, he'd not been able to read the books that year as he didn't have the focus for reading. 

Seeing this pattern and how it was basically the whole story in a series of images would allow him to 'read' the story by looking at the scarf. I'm anticipating this being more like a scroll hung on a wall or pulled out of a drawer though, as he lives in a rather warm climate.

I decided to double knit this in black and light blue Loops & Threads Impeccable acrylic and I'm quite happy with how it's coming out. My tension isn't perfect as I'm knitting one colour continental and the other English, but it's not glaring, and has been practice for both types of knitting.

There are 9 sections all told in the scarf, and I've completed 6.5, so I'm very much on the home stretch and excited to get it done so I can surprise my coworker.

I'm hoping to have this done by the end of March. Any sooner would be awesome too but as a mother of two very young children I'm being realistic.

A Trove of Treasures

 It's amazing the stuff you can find when you're sorting through a life's worth of stuff.

8 more boxes of books, fabric, patterns and such out the door, along with a dining table that I used to use for my crafting but no longer have room for.

It's hard having to part with things but, at the same time, every box out the door is a weight off of me.

The fun part of going through all these boxes that have been packed up for years is the random stuff I either forgot I had, or have been looking for for ages.

For example:

A black cape made for a friend that got lost in the shuffle. Said friend has allowed me to keep it as she doesn't need two. This is specifically a cape based on the hooded figures found in the dog park from Welcome to Nightvale. I may have my Halloween costume for next year.

A slipper pattern that my mother has been looking for. My Grandmother had scores of these slippers, specifically the bottom right, in her house. In an effort to continue having the slipper tradition, my mother was trying to reverse engineer from a pair she still has. 

Most interesting is 4 skeins of Sami Amano. I am not a knitter who enjoys knitting with cotton. I usually do anything I can to avoid working with it. So I'm trying to scratch my brain to figure out why I have 4 skeins of Peruvian cotton stashed away in a box. I can only guess that I either had a pattern planned or I won the yarn from my local guild. I'm thinking that I have a cotton tank top in my future.

While I've gotten through most of my stash now, I'm intrigued to see what else we'll dig up as we go through the rest of the boxes.

In other news, the absolute frigid weather broke to allow the snow to melt just enough to make an itty bitty snow man with my daughter.

Progress Achieved

 

Step one to getting the craft room set up is figuring out what I have. To do that I need to dig out the dining room which has been our holding area for far too long.

Exhibit A is probably 90% of my fibre stash, the coke can is for scale. The bottom bucket is full of 2 full alpaca fleeces, and a bag of miscellaneos camelids from a conference workshop I did. The top bucket is the wool/silk/mixed fibres that I will hopefully soon get to play with. I still want to catelogue what I have so I can keep track of what I do with the various spins and what I learn.

Exhibit B is 4 of 8 boxes of fabric, patterns, and various odds and sods that I decided were not things I would use and could go find other homes.

I'm being very tough with myself this time, making sure that anything I keep has projects earmarked for it. Not that these are set in stone, but by knowing at least what garment I will make with something and that it's something I will actually wear, then I don't end up with pretty stash that has no purpose.

When I was disposing of my moth ridden stash last year, I came to terms with the fact that, while I had a lot of pretty yarn, I didn't have enough of one type of yarn to make anything with. Lots of single balls, or scraps leftover that ultimately were useless. 

Whatever stash I keep, needs to be useful.

New Spaces

New blog, new year, new craft room!

Welcome to the new spaces of 2023. I ended off 2022 with the growth of our family from 3 to 4 people (plus 2 cats) and all the adjustments that come with that. As we were coming closer to the delivery of our Little Man, we went full renovation in our basement as what was my office and the guest room needed to become a toddler room.

After 6 months of continuous work, we are finally at a point where we can get our house back!! 

The office area, which about an 8'x10' space plus a decent sized closet, is also my craft space and I'm just starting to go through all the stuff that got shoved into my dining room to wait for it's forever home. With this, I have had to make some very difficult decisions about what I'm keeping and what I'm not. Difficult because a lot of my craft stuff has more emotional value than actual craft value.

For example: I got rid of 6 tomato boxes worth of sewing patterns that were inherited from various family members that were neither my size nor my style. These were sewing patterns I was never going to make but had difficulty getting rid of due to the connection to the past. 

How I got started pulling this bandaid off was not really my planning but the universe 'assisting' me. Back in 2020, when we were first looking at slowly fixing up the basement, I went into my craft room to see a number of little bugs flutter away. Sadly, I had brought 4 oz of black wool fibre that apparently was infested with moth eggs. In the process of starting to clean that up, we discovered that we had a crack in the basement that flooded the corner and destroyed a number of boxes that were stacked on the floor filled with miscellaneous items, fabric, and yarn. I ended up tossing about 14 industrial sized garbage bags worth of craft supplies into a dumpster box that a neighbour had rented.

The only part of my stash untouched was my spinning fibre as it was packed in sealed bags.

After that loss (and a fair amount of tears) I'm going through what I have left and being very strict with myself on what I'm keeping and what's leaving. I don't have a lot of space, and honestly, looking back through the years if I was looking to start a new project I almost never went to my stash for it. At least with knitting. That makes it a hoard and not a stash. So, it's time to make the room, the stash, and all the accessories work for me from here on out. I have a feeling that once I have my space set up I'll be a lot more productive.

At least once the baby starts sleeping more than 2-3 hours at a time.