3 posts tagged “etsy”

The completed spindle arrived on the first:

Tiger Spindle

I am pleased. :)

Additionally, I'm also reaching the point of needing an extra set of eyes on a knitting pattern that I've been working on: Currently, I'm polling knitting friends for assistance. We'll see what comes of it!

Time's moving a little too quickly for me these days, it seems: I thought about posting my recent Etsy finds -- two weeks ago, not realizing how much time had actually slipped away.

Hoo boy.

So, I'll be backposting my finds for Saint Patrick's, and I'll just try to be better in the future. :}

First off: I recently joined a fiber and spindle club, from Etsy's Butterfly Girl Designs.
I originally found Butterfly Girl Designs thanks to the Winter 2008 edition of Knitty's Cool Stuff: She's featured in the lower third of the page, if you want to take a look, but it doesn't tell you a single thing about how very cool a person this seller is.  She didn't get irked when I went all bouncy-like and excited about the fiber club that I'd just missed buying -- and she did indeed let me know when the fiber club opened again.
(Also, she writes occasionally to comment on the other spindles I've found on Etsy; it turns out she was giving serious consideration to the Time Flies spindle, too -- though she said she was glad it'd found a good home.)  :)

So, a week ago, my first fiber/spindle club order came in, and this was the result:

Temptation is a blend of cashmere, silk, camel, and merino: And yes, it really is tempting. I'm almost half a mind to asking her to just send more of that so I can spin up a sweater's worth -- but then I'd miss out on all her other lovely possibilities. (And I know they're lovely, since I've bought Blue Morpho, Blackbird, and Tuscany, all merino/bamboo blends  -- with the latter two including firestar for glitz.)

And the Italian Resin spindle is just a happy, lovely coincidence, since I've recently decided square whorl spindles are pretty nifty. :)

And speaking of the Time Flies spindle -- Yorkieslave's another Etsy spindle seller that I can't seem to find enough good things to say to give you the full picture of how very awesome she is. She's actually taken a commission from me, because she had some really interesting Cheetah and Cougar spindles -- but no tigers. (I have a great love for tigers.)

Spindle in Progress, by Yorkieslave

I'm in awe.
Also, yes, that is a very large spindle: I wanted it that way, since my current largest spindle is a little on the difficult side. (No hook. And no, it's not a supported spindle.)

Also, her fiber batts are very creative color-wise, and so, so soft: I bought more of her colorway of Alice,  which is the mini-batt that came with my Tempus Fugit spindle -- mostly because I am a lover of yarns, and soft roving and batts are just an extension of that. :)

Last week, I finished my Tilted Duster in Knitpicks Main Line yarn.
During the next three days of wearing it, I found out that Main Line sheds horribly -- so I borrowed my mom's washer and washed it.
It turned into a poofy, fuzzy mess, and I'm still caught somewhere between severe irritation (Superwash yarn, fer chrissakes!), depression (oh my God, how much work wasted?), and the vague hope that it's all still salvageable. ... I really, really want it to be salvagable, because I'm already well in love with that sweater.
And that's most of what I was doing on Saturday, killing the time in-between by taking apart my Kromski Prelude and sanding its parts.

After two years of going around with an unfinished spinning wheel, I'm finally going to put a protective coat on it. The surprising break in the rain's helped a lot with that: I forgot my two yard niddy-noddy at home for the sanding job, alas, but I can fix that this weekend. Dad's even offered up his workbench for the staining and such -- maybe if I'm really lucky, he'll even give me a hand. I'm opting to use some of his Oak stain, rather than go with mahogany or anything else that's similiar to the finishes available for Kromski wheels: After all, why imitate if I can customize?

I've been playing with a lot of handspindles in the mean time, and while I don't have a serious amount of yarn made yet, I do seem to have a small and steadily growing collection of lace- to fingering-weight singles mounting up. I'm still debating if I want to leave them as singles or ply them: I'm probably going to go with the latter, since I have this abysmal habit of overtwisting my yarn that I haven't yet figured out how to avoid, and plying seems to help keep the yarn from twisting around and around and again on itself, once I've set the twist.  -- It probably also helps that I have two new, lovely spindles, weighing in at .6 oz and 1.2 oz, respectively.

Both were Etsy finds: That site continues to be a huge temptation for me. Really, I just need to start selling some of my knitting up there, if only so I have money for all the pretty things I can possibly find there!

First, from Yorkieslave:

Tempus Fugit Spindle

I'm perhaps a little too amused by the fact that it's a crazy clock-face on the spindle's top: On the other hand, I'm apparently not the only one that thinks Lewis Carroll, since the seller sent along a mini-batt of yummy bamboo-merino fiber in a colorway she calls Alice.

And the other, from Butterfly Girl Designs:

Tigereye Stone Spindle

I have a weakness for Tiger's eye.