the call

Picture paperdag, all warm and cozy in a comfy chair, while it's cold and not cozy at all outside. 

I was happily working on this new sweater and I can hardly put it down, cause this yarn is just so soft and lovely to work with and the fabric I'm creating feels so yummy and looks so pretty.

All is well and then it happened. The call. 

I resisted until today, when I opened the teak chest which holds this. Tosh Merino from NYC.

Sigh.

Right next to it the Araucania from Eureka, which I had almost forgotten. Almost. 

Another sigh.

Some touching and petting and contemplating happened. Before I could take a closer look at the gorgeous ball of alpaca in the lower left corner I closed the chest (can you see it? Pink and purple!). 

Now I wonder how long it will take until I give in and cast on with the Tosh Merino. Or maybe the Araucania after all? Oh wait, or will it be the super soft alpaca?

Life is tough. 

On knitting. Again

While finishing the Drifting cardigan this loveliness was already calling me.

I had purchased five of these generous skeins, dyed by Plain&Fancy Sheep&Wool Co. at the Taos Wool Festival in 2012, plenty for a sweater. 

I decided to go without a pattern and to make this up, copying the fitting of a favorite shirt of mine.

There was swatching, measuring, calculating, sketching, more calculating. Then I re-calculated  (*sigh*, yes, way too much math, if you ask me), I cast on and voila!

 I hope that it will all come together, because this sure looks pretty! New Mexico colors, I think!

 As I went through my pictures I stumbled upon these from Christmas. There are always some hand knitted gifts like the dark blue and purple cowl that I made for my mom using some supersoft Malabrigo merino yarn from a yarn store in Hawaii. 

While it sure looks lovely, never mind me and my knits, cause I'm an old pro - here comes the exciting part...

What really means the world is a gift that my daughter gave her Oma. Because this girl started knitting just last year! 

It was really for the longest time just a piece of knitted fabric, that she kept working on to practice her new skill until just a week before Christmas. That's when she decided that she had to turn this thing into a Cowl/Neckwarmer/Miniscarf - capitalized, yes! - for Oma. With the obsession of a determined mind she went to work and finished the second half of the scarf just in time and she did it all by herself, even casting off! I only contributed by sewing on the button for closure - the girl had to sleep at some point!

That she chose to give her first ever knitted piece to her Oma meant so much to me, because, you know, that's where it comes from! The art, the knowledge, the wisdom of the working hands, it comes from the generations before us, from the women, who preserved it for us, the daughters and grand daughters.

Oma was a lucky woman this Christmas, but in fact we all are.

On Knitting and such

Time flies when you're having fun, gulp. I will try to ignore the date on the last post and pretend I've kept you up with the happenings in the sheep's studio. Shall we?!

Now that this is settled I want to wish you all a Happy New Year! Yes, that is still okay, after all it's not February. Yet. Maybe I'll look back just a tiny bit into the past year, too.

2013 held a lot of knitting. I had a love-hate relationship with this cardigan, such fine yarn, so soft, such a perfect color for me, but sooo many stitches that tested my patience. I just finished it, sigh.

I made stuff for friends, f.ex. this alpaca cowl that went to my dear friend Ulrike in Virginia.

As usual I bought too much yarn. 

I got this lovely cotton ribbon yarn in a tiny store in the town where I was born in Germany. I loved working with it so much and the gradual color changes look so pretty, that I bought another color way: pink-orange! I'll keep you posted.

Then there was Christmas knitting and I made two of these hats for my nieces in Germany.

I have sewed pencil pouches. Lots of them. Sixty maybe or even more. Seriously! 

They are real popular in my daughter's grade and she has sold quite a bunch right out of her backpack!

One of my personal highlights was the first time ever participation in a Fiber Festival! In November I went to Silver City, NM with two friends, where we sold as ZiaWoolz! Lots of dyed wools, yarns, knitted garments and materials for rug hookers and we had a blast!

We as a family ended the year with a family trip and took my mom who was visiting. 

Death Valley, ghost towns and New Year's in Las Vegas with lots of yummy food, it was great!

 Now Oma is back in Germany, we are back to school and normal life. 

A year with many unknown adventures lies ahead of us. 

I am looking forward to more knitting, spinning, rug hooking, dyeing, traveling and never boring family times!  And I can't wait to find out about your adventures, too!

Works of gratitude

If you have ever laid your hands on japanese craft/knitting/crochet magazines or books, you will know how lucky I am to have a friend with a kind hearted husband, who brought me a whole bag full from a business trip to Japan. 

He even went through the trouble twice! 

The books are packed with beautiful pictures, awesome projects and the writing.. ah well, looks lovely, too, even though I don't understand a single word! (In most cases I can figure out how to work from the pictures, crochet charts or sewing patterns, so it really is okay!)

I found out that he very much likes scarves and with the new year and the whole UFO thing, I finally got on to it, picked up the project that I had started a good while ago, but dumped for tremendous ugliness. 

I had a great idea how it would end up perfect and started knitting in a brioche pattern.

Literally just the next day after I started working on the scarf I found out from my friend that her husband is leaving for a temporary job in Switzerland THIS friday! Yikes - it sure still is freezing cold over there and people not just wear scarves, they NEED them.

I pushed the red emergency button and put that knitting into high speed gear and I am almost there, it's about 4 ft long already!

Now if you'll excuse me, have a great day, I gotta get back to my scarf knitting!

Flashback Saturday

All of us bloggers take plenty of pictures, even more since photos went digital. I have lost pictures with computer crashes, but just recently I have found pictures and I want to share them for more reasons than just because the are so darn cute! 

I discovered them on my online photo site Shutterfly and at some point Shutterly must have changed rules for users, because - what used to be not possible - I could get them back from the site to my computer.

Here are some of my favorites.

Lewis at the time was into nature, specifically bugs and had watched this little guy transform from caterpillar to butterfly! 

 I really enjoyed looking at the "old" hand knits, too.

My mom made this cardigan and it was a favorite for a long time.

The earflap hat grew with Fiona, lol, I believe she wore it for 4 winters - would you believe it?!

She did have a sweater that matched the scarf - all hand spun - unfortunately no picture of that.

I loved this sweater - made from space dyed hand spun merino wool, I still remember how soft it was! I believe it was one of my own early dye attempts!

Same sweater here..

Makes me realize that our lives are not just measured in years that pass oh-so fast, but also in what we create and what we are passionate about, may it be butterflies, tricycles, spinning, knitting and oh yes, definitely pictures as well!

Have a wonderful weekend, friends!

Blue Changes

A little while after I was done with my dyeing yesterday I found some forgotten strips, that I should have thrown in with everything. In the end this turned out to be a good thing because it gave me the chance to really compare the old to the new strips. 

When I looked at the mellowed out wool pieces on the drying rack I was initially disappointed because besides evening out the shades I had also tried to go altogether lighter and I thought it did not happen.

But once I compared them side by side - above two strips are the new blues (one of them originally a houndstooth) - I found a real distinct difference!

I am very happy with the result!

Won't have a chance to pull some loops until tonight, it will be exciting to see!

The Quest

Do you as an artist feel like one day you will be There? You will have achieved your goals and your work will be perfect? I seriously doubt that there is one of you out there who answers yes to that question. I am sure that even the teachers among you will be the first to tell me that they never stop learning. 

Since I started my journey into rug hooking three years ago a whole new world to express myself has opened up. I fell in love. Rug hooking gives me a creative outlet where I need to slow down. I have to pace myself, think about my visual goals and how I can achieve them. And oh boy, is there much to learn.

I wanna tell you about my biggest learning experience in 2012, which at first sight may seem minor, but  makes a world of difference. check out the two pumpkins, ignore the different frames. Anything click?

Omg - first go (above) I hooked a solid brown stem. Nice enough. Teacher told me it does not work, because I have a dimensional pumpkin, so I pulled out just a few loops, added some checkered brown (below) and 'bam' - there it was, my biggest "yes, I get it!" of the year - such small changes lead to making it right - wow! Can you tell that I am still in awe..?!

(yes, this is one of my UFOs and I will transform the pumpkin soon into a little pillow!)

At times I knit, spin and sew more, but the urge to pull some loops is great and grows with time. The internet feeds to that. When you browse the blogworld, you see so many beautiful creations that inspire, just look at my bloglist on the side!

 The other day I threw all of my three unfinished rugs on the floor so that every time I walked by I got the visual input and was reminded to think about where I wanna take them.

In the end I focused on the large rug with my kids drawings. I dyed up blue woolens for the background. Not sure if the color would work I started working around my first finished motives.

 This morning in our small rug hooking group we discussed it, because I just wasn't sure.

 Turned out my blues were too busy, as a background too distractive from the kids designs.

So we jumped into action and went from piles of woolen blues, some white and a tad bit of green...

 ....... to the dye pots...

...and got this!

 Shades of a more uniform lighter blue!

I ended up "marrying" all my blues and yes, I did pull out what I had previously hooked.

Now I am not-patiently-at-all waiting for my new colors to dry so I can pull the blues!

What are you learning these days?