New Style

Hey there! What do you think of the new style? I want to thank the blogger team for making this update to the blog as easy as possible! I nabbed the photo from Yarn 365. But then, I guess it's not really nabbing it if it's my own, right?

The next blog project is going to be to cut down on some of the clutter there on the sidebar. I think the main offender is the blog list. It'd be good to cut that down to size. Back in the day, I used to use that blog list to read all the blogs. Now I use google reader, so I'm a little less concerned about it, but it's still nice to show some love to the folks I follow. Trouble is, I read a LOT of blogs now, and I'm not sure I really want ALL of them listed on the sidebar, for fear the sidebar will never end!

I do, however, think you should check out this post by Knit Princess. It's a hilarious comic panel and kind of made my day. I wish I were going to Comic Con this year so I could get a great photo of Darth Vader holding up some nifty yarn for Yarn 365.

At any rate, I'm really happy with the way the redesign of the blog turned out and I'm looking forward to going through that blog list on some other day.

What I Took Away From the Swap

I was pretty good at the swap last weekend. I brought a lot of stash yarn (I realized I brought quite a bit more than I actually listed), and a lot of it magically went away! The key to swaps is that you should always bring back less than you take with you. For this swap, I really wasn't in much danger of taking back more than I brought with me, but since I'm moving at the end of July, I really was trying to take as little as possible.

That being said, of course I fell to a few pretties:


Some sort of lace weight silk. I'm not sure what I'll do with it yet, but it sure is pretty and soft.


Twisted Fiber Art's Kabam! yarn in Giles colorway. This might turn into a really pretty scarf, or, more likely since it stripes, it might turn into a nifty pair of socks. Maybe Rick from Cookie A's Sock Innovation (I'm kind of addicted to her book right now).

I also picked up some of my friend Malia's handspun yarn:

(click on the images to make them bigger on flickr)

At the party, we also dyed yarn. It was my first time dying at all, and I was really impressed with how the wool yarn took the dye. The yarn I dyed was leftover from my Over the Knee Stockings (the successful ones - Malia dyed the yarn I used for the unsuccessful ones). There's a before and after shot at the end of the post. First, we soaked the yarn to get it ready to take all the dye.

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The Louet Gems I used is at the bottom of the pot.


I used the Mango Kool-Aid to get an orangey color.


Isn't it pretty!?

Here's that comparative shot I was telling you about.


I think I figured out a way to re-invent my knitting blog. Before Ravelry I used to post all sorts of project stuff. Since Ravelry, however, all of that goes onto Ravelry and then there's not much else to post about. I do a fair amount of fiber artsy stuff, so I think from now on this blog is going to be more about all other yarny stuff I do. Like the dying and swap party, moving the stash, knitterly books I read (I recently read Sweater Quest and rather loved it, so a review of that will be coming up soon), event recaps and such. What do you think of that? I guess if I have issues with knitting I'll still be posting them here, or any triumphs and stuff like that. I'm just having an issue keeping up with knitting and posting about knitting. Posting about knitting actually takes up knitting time, so I think I'll get back to the knitting now, and come back later with a book review!