Friday, June 27, 2025

Fiber Arts Friday: Estes Park Wool Market, 2025

In February 2025, soon after the schedule came out, I signed up for two classes for this year's Estes Park Wool Market.

Thursday was Blending Board Primer - this is my fourth class with Clemes and Clemes and was focused on making rolags.

Friday was Spin Goldilocks with Maggie Casey.  This class was focused on medium wools, which are some of my favorite.  I also want to soak up as much of Maggie Casey's knowledge as I can while she's still teaching.  :-)

So ultimately the weekend was focused on Woolen style prep and spinning techniques.

I got the long-draw working a little bit.  Spinning from the rolag felt weird at first, but I think I have a much better understanding between the Worsted and Woolen techniques now.


I also found it nice that we were in the Government and Spanish Language Classrooms of the High School.

I had a schedule conflict for the remainder of the weekend, so I spent some time at the Friday open market for students... I was kind of looking for a yarn suitable for a project I am pondering.  I didn't find anything that grabbed me.  Which is unusual.

I guess, the more I have the skills to make what I want, the less I'm interested in purchasing it.  But in this case, I'm not quite sure what I want yet, other than fine gauge and a moody color.

Happy Fiber Arts Friday!

Friday, June 20, 2025

Fiber Arts Friday: Cozy Stripes Sweater, part 10

We're getting close to the home stretch for this project.... As of the last post, only 2 arms, sewing on buttons, weaving in ends, and repairing two dropped stitches is ALL that remains.  Ha.  :-)


At the beginning of this section, I have 3 full brown skeins available for the arms and 14g of Skein #7 that I will reserve for button sewing.

AND.... we've reached the warm part of the year.  Progress on this project has slowed way down.

Since it will be 100F today, I think the responsible thing to do is to recognize that very little work will be completed on this project over the next few months.  Which means it is essentially in Time Out and I will be focusing on much smaller projects such as socks for the near term.

As of this writing, I am about half-complete with the first arm.


Skein duration:

  • #1 (11/2/24 - 12/10/24) 5wks 3days
  • #2 (12/10/24 - 12/30/24) 2wks 6days
  • #3 (12/30/24 - 1/6/25) 1 week
  • #4 (1/6/25 - 1/18/25) 1wk 5days
  • #5 (1/18/25 - 2/5/25) - 2wks 4days - 14 g remain
  • Green (2/5/25 - 2/6/25) - 2days - 22 g remain (begin body stripes)
  • Orange (2/6/25 - 2/8/25) - 3days - 23g remain
  • #5 (2/8/25 - 2/9/25) - 2days - 11 g remain
  • Orange (2/9/25) - 1day - 18 g remain
  • Green (2/10/25 - 2/14/25) - 5days - 17 g remain (complete body stripes)
  • #5 (2/14/25 - 2/20/25) - 6days (begin hem)
  • #6 (2/20/25 - 2/25/25) - 5days - 20g remain (complete hem, bind off pending)
  • TINK Body Hem (2/27/25 - 3/6/25)  - 8days
  • #5 (3/6/25 - 3/22/25) - 2 wks 2 days (begin re-Knitting Body Hem with smaller needles, US3)
  • #6 (3/22/25 - 3/23/25) - 2 days (complete and bind-off Body Hem) - 19g remain
  • Pickup Collar/Button Band Stitches (3/24/25 - 3/30/25) - 6days
  • #6 (3/30/25 - 4/10/25) - 11days (begin Button Band/Collar, US3)
  • #7 (4/10/25 - 4/22/25) - 12days (complete Button Band/Collar and Bind off) - 14g remain
  • #8 (4/23/25 - 6/4/25) - 6wks (begin Arm #1, on hold for the summer) - 10g remain

Happy Fiber Arts Friday!