Tribbles

These little pompoms keep multiplying, like Tribbles :)

Pom!

Oh hello, my little blog, it's been so long! I have been making things, but not posting. But here's a little something I made this morning, from a Japanese crafting book of pompoms. I am sure that I am missing a lot in the instructions, but the diagrams give the basic gist of wrapping the yarn to make an apple, a burger, a flower, a Russian nesting doll, and more. I am slightly obsessed. This is the second apple I made, and it possibly got a better haircut than the first. That's the main thing I figured out, cut, cut, cut, and cut some more, it really does improve the look. Here's hoping that I will be back soon.

Thifty Crafty

A good thrift shopping trip is when you've had something in the back of your mind that you've been meaning to find, and it shows up at the thrift for cheap, like the Raleigh Retro 16 bike I found for my four year old, just like the one her older sister has, but in a different color, and for $110 cheaper. It is in great shape and looks like this one but purple.

Plus a few fun things for me! I love vintage pattern art, check out just a few of the beauties....

See the grey number on the right? Adore.


Casual or elegant? I like the flowers at the waist.


Wonder what these on the left ladies misplaced? A parrot maybe?


Florals always make me feel good.


And finally, something for socks plus a little alpaca. Score!

Six Little Mice Sat Down To Spin

I'm back from a three day vacation to Portland! Eating in restaurants, shopping, and not having to clean..that's really my idea of relaxing.

I went to Yarnia and spent more than an hour, trying to wrap my brain around the concept and pick some yarn. The deal is, you pick out some coned yarn, up to six different yarns, and they will combine the strands together and wind them onto a cone and sell them to you priced by the pound. Keep in mind that your resulting cones will not contain plied yarn, it's strands of yarn wound onto a cone but not twisted into a cohesive yarn.

I was excited to check it out, it's pretty affordable compared to brand-name yarn, and you can mix and match many different fiber and color combinations.

It's a different way of thinking about yarn buying. I went in hoping for wool by itself or combined with strands of linen, rayon, or mohair. And I wasn't looking for high-contrast color combinations. I found that the color selection was much better for the cottons. And for most of the wools that I liked there was only a cone or two on the shelf. I had a hard time finding enough cones to combine to get the thickness I wanted, which meant 4-6 strands of yarn to get DK weight to chunky, depending on which yarn I picked. It sounds like they are getting more yarn in all the time, so it's possible that there may be more available on another day.



I settled on the one pictured, two strands of two-ply wool combined with three strands of linen. It worked out to somewhere between worsted and chunky weight, and 1/2 pound, which works out to about 250 yards, set me back about $13. I like the rough/shiny look, as well as the low-contrast color combination.

I made another pick as well, gray and blue merino combined to make DK weight. I am not sure about the color combo, so I am going to ponder this one a bit. It may be crazy but I am thinking about separating the colors and re-winding the cones. It was worth the price, which was about $28 for a pound, but maybe I'll like it better as two separate colors.