Monday, August 17, 2015

Stash Dash Fail


So you can guess from the title of my post that I didn't make my 5000 m goal for Stash Dash. It's been an interesting summer really. A summer that didn't involve a lot of knitting or spinning. Thankfully it did involve some shopping at lots of different LYSs. I bought some pretty amazing things from some pretty amazing stores. But I didnt knit a whole lot. 

We traveled for three weeks this summer in our RV. Our first stop was Ottawa to visit my daughter Amy. While there I went to a really sweet little shop called Wabi Sabi. She had a lot of spinning supplies and a lot of weaving supplies too. 

While I was there I bought a huge box of multicolored fibers from Ashford.  

Isn't that amazing? After we left Ottawa we went on to PEI where  Max had a week of hockey camp. You would think I would have found time to knit then. I mean I did knit a little but not a tremendous amount. 

 Max and I went to the farmers market one Saturday while in Charlottetown and we had such a good time. Homemade lemonade, a bagpiping busker and a sheppardess selling handspun and Fiber and needle felting kits were the highlights.  

Later in the week Kevin and I went to Julie's Yarn Shoppe inBorder. I bought several skeins of locally milled yarn as well as several skeins that were naturally dyed by Julie herself. And .... I can barely contain myself ..... I bought a set of hand cards!!! 

Yes I have a drum carder. But I've been really wanting hand cards for a while. I've got this very lofty goal of carding up this gradient of colours (from my sampler box from Wabi Sabi) I'm envisioning this coat of many colourstype of garment where one colour gradually fades into the next.  With hand cards I can do this!! And I have more than enough fiber for a sweater. I may stripe it with grey or natural but I'm not sure. Lots of swatching will be necessary. Plus I'll have to spin it all into yarn too. It's not just the blending.  

So you can tell I've been very distracted. I managed to finish up two more pairs of stripey socks since I blogged last. I can't get enough stripey socks!!

 I had hoped to finish my Exploration Station shawl in time for stash dash but I was two days late. In any case I'm glad I finished it. It's huge!! And beautiful.

I'm very happy with how it turned out. Next year I will plan better and surely make my goal of 5000 meters.