Sun shine

Our farm in Michigan is under snow so we escaped to a place where the sun shines = bliss

I am thinking a white Christmas is overrated.  Sun is so good!! I'd take sun over snow anyday. 

So was spending time with these two :)

My heart sings to see the sun, hear the birds sing, and spend time with family. 

The time of year for products

I've been busy keeping up my stock of products:

The fixed ones

Here they are, now not too stretchy:

Again

Here is the blue, brown and tan headband that I pulled apart (just like the black and grey one in my last post).

 I knit it this time with a smaller needle:

I can already tell it has more bounce to the stretch. Instead of pulling so long it loses it's form, it pulls and pulls a little back.

Frogging

Frogging = knitter talk for "rip it" out.

I am not one to avoid frogging if I know the end will be a better product.  Here is my daughter's headband after one use:

It was stretchy, but in a too much stretch way.

So I pulled it apart:

As I pulled out each color stripe of yarn, I tied the ends together and put it in a ball, so that I can knit it again, in the same color pattern:

Teen Flare

I consulted with the teenage crowd and was told these colors are the colors (browns, tans and blues). I was excited that I have these all on hand to knit this up quick!!

My daughter grabbed up the grey and black version of this headband.  She wore it once.  Then it disappeared.  I asked her what happened.  She then told me it wasn't working great.  It would stretch longer and longer and that made it hard to wear.

I was troubled. I don't want to make things that are hard to wear :(  So I thought about it.  For this stripped version, I grabbed a bigger size knitting needle.  The idea to me was that it would make it more lacy looking.  Well, I think it made it lose some structure though too.  So I went out on a limb.  I took all the striped ones I had made, and I ripped them out.  I will show more about that in my next post.

Christmas grab bag

For our Christmas party at work, we do a grab bag gift exchange.  You bring in a gift, it goes into a pile.  Everyone gets a number.  The first person picks a gift, opens it, the next person can steal the first person's gift or take a new one from the un-open pile.  And it goes on.

Every couple of years I bring in an Alpaca product for my grab bag gift.  This year I brought in this:

The yarn came from fiber off of Rose, Tehya, Gabriel and Greyt Exxpectations.  All great alpacas who roamed our farm once upon a time :)

I haven't mentioned here yet the fact I had to re-knit all the stripped headbands all over again.  Thankfully I realized this need before the Christmas party.  I was up late last night finishing up the re-knit.  And I am so  happy I did.  I'll explain why in a future post.

More headbands!!

This past weekend I knit 3 different headband / Neck warmers / Ear muffs.

First I did these:

The dark rose grey one sold right away (the second I put a picture of it on my Facebook page).   The black n grey stripe, well, my daughter snatched that up!  She said "if it doesn't sell, I want it."  How could I not let her have it? 

Then I knit this one (link to ETSY sales page):

That one is for sale on our farm ETSY page. 

Creativity center

My weekends are often pretty low key.  My goal for Saturday is to clean my house.  Since the whole family helps with that, it's not a huge task.  My goal for Sunday is to go for a run (I'm not up to my usually long run Sunday of 7 miles, since surgery I've only built up to 4 miles.  I'm getting there though).   So, after these things are done, my day is mine to do fiber arts!!!

The coffee table in front of my couch is covered in my creative wears ~  various skeins of hand spun alpaca yarn and needles and scissors and measuring tape and buttons and all: 

Some phases look more messy than others.  And somehow, out of this I end up with some knit products.

Knitting

I have been really busy with my day job but manage to get in some knitting here and there.