Thursday, November 24, 2011

Obsessed


Hello, my name is Kathi. I'm a fiber-aholic. I've become totally obsessed with working with fiber-and have gone off the deep end and got my self yet another new "toy" to add to my fiber addiction. Great tools make for great yarn-right? (enable me here-okay?) I just HAD to have a spinning wheel that I could make big fat Art Yarn on. My Ashford traditional (on the left in pic) spins beautifully. I was so very lucky that my friend Bonnie gave her to me. That was the start. Then last winter I just had to have the Fricke (on the right in the pic) to spin art yarn. She spins beautifully, too, but I was trying some big fat core-spun yarn and it kept tangling up in the end of the delta orifice. Being frustrated with that led me to buying my new Ashford Country Spinner (in the middle of pic.) I bought it through Susan's Fiber Shop in Columbus, WI. She was fun to work with and her hubby assembled it free of charge. (Thank heavens-cuz the instructions showed a million pieces). I got it home and immediately spun up 30 yards of BIG FAT core-spun yarn. It worked better than I had hoped. I don't have pictures yet of the yarn-hopefully at the end of this long holiday weekend I will have a bunch to show off. I'm off to spin now.....

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Scarves and a new Picker



I've been working on weaving some scarves to put in a gallery night at The Glass Haus in Green Bay (Monica and Tom Pecor-owners) on November 17th. So far I have 5-they take longer than I first thought-but I'm pretty happy with them and hope someone else will like them , too.
I also got myself another piece of fiber equipment-a Lil' Dynamo box picker. It definitely will help me pick through, clean, and fluff up all the wool I've been washing and dying lately. Using hand carders and picking by hand not only takes forever, but its been killing my wrists and hands. I did a nice big pile with the picker in less than an hour. It would've taken many hours spread out over many days to have done that by hand. There is still more processing to do-but, it sure made short work of the the picking process. Whew-buying it was a wise choice.

  I entered an essay contest to win a 170th anniversary Singer sewing machine. It was to celebrate the 12,000 subcribers to a YouTube channe...