Flashin' My Stash

So, as you may know if you're a local yarnie, Herrschners (a local yarn and scrapbooking store) was having a closing sale last week. I got some very nice yarn:

for a rather decent price. The red skeins on top are cashmere. But then when I got home, I couldn't fit them onto my yarn shelves, so obviously the only solution was to reorganize ALLLLLLLL my yarn. So I put in on my bed:

...which was a lovely experience. Then I organized everything by fiber type and quality:

Cheaper wool:

A very small part of my crappy acrylic:

Some nicer acrylic:

Handspun, handdyed and dying yarn:

Non-wool fibers:

My fancy nice wool:

It's nice to have yarn yarn yarn yarn. I went wading:

Frustration and Halloween

Arg. My scarf is making NO PROGRESS. I knitted about eight inches in the pattern I posted previously, which had a really neat texture, and I really liked it, but I just don't have enough yarn to make that scarf a decent length...and I really can't let myself buy any more yarn right now.

So I frogged it and found another lace pattern. It's quite nice, lots of yo's (yos?) so hopefully the yarn will go a bit farther. I knitted a couple inches with THAT pattern, only to find out I needed to use bigger needles to get it to show the pattern properly. I got frustrated, threw it into the "current projects" bin, and started knitting a tag for bombing with.

Bleh, school has been making me frustrated lately. This week and last week (and the week before, actually) have had so many assignments and midterms that I haven't really had time to get crafty, except for things like knitting in class (which doesn't really count b/c I don't really focus on it).

I did make these little packets though, which I'd been meaning to do for AGES:

They're filled with dried lavender, and I'm putting them in with my yarn and fibre to keep it safe from horrible moths. There's a whole bunch of lavender bushes next to my building (mostly dead now) that I harvested flowers from last month. I haven't seen any moths yet, but I'm terrified of the possibility. It's such a senseless way to loose yarn! I just can't let it happen.

Also, it was halloween! I love halloween so much, costumes are so much fun. This year I went as Delirium (from Sandman).

My right eye has a fish drawn on it, and my hair has fish beads wired into it. I also blew up a bunch of balloons and drew fish on them, then scatted them around the apartment. It only seemed appropriate.

I really want to read Sandman again though.

The best costume though, was definitely this one:

Do you get it? Do you get it? It's a sheet of acid! (The person who made it is actually not the person wearing it, but this was the only picture.)

ALL THE YARN

I am proud to announce I can now go into Len's Mill without attempting to buy ALL THE YARN. I think it's because I'm now a total yarn snob, and want to save my yarn money for buying gorgeous fancy yarn.

Anyway, I got some white 100% wool yarn because I want to practice dying yarn! I'm only using food colouring for now, since I can get it locally, it makes bright colours, and I can still use the dishes I dye in afterwards. I've only dyed yarn I've spun so far, but spinning takes quite a while, and I'd like to be able to practise on yarn I didn't put tons of effort into.

Here's the skein of yarn I spun + dyed most recently:



100% "organic fibre" from Louet (I'm not sure what "organic fibre" means). Hand spun with a drop spindle. Single ply. Hand dyed with food colouring. Approx 200m, 145g, DK weight. There's a bit of slub in this, but not as much as previous yarn I've spun!

Censoring Myself

...sort of. So, I bought these labels to attach to my yarn bombing:



They say "Zilliah Bailey" and "zilliah.ca." They iron on but I'm sewing them on to be safe.

(Sidenote: look at my awesome tiny craft iron! )

Anyway, so now my yarn bombs are traceable to my website, which is traceable to here and my flickr. Plus I had to use my real name to get the website, etc, etc...and while I don't really think yarn bombs count as graffiti, certain other ...art-related things do. So pictures of graffiti aren't going to be public on my flickr anymore, and I probably won't blog about them (had I? I don't remember.). Oh well. At least I'm self-censoring instead of someone else doing it? I'm only going to censor things that have legal repercussions/fines. (If you want to see these secret pictures that may or may not exist, just message me on flickr, and I'll friend you.)

Bleh, I don't know if I'm overreacting, but a friend who yarnbombs was putting up a tag and got stopped by a police officer, who said it might be considered "mischief" and that they'd been noticing all the yarn things, so drawing attention to less cosy street art is probably not the best plan.

It seems unfair to talk about yarn bombing but not show anything, so here's the piece I put up tonight! Green acrylic yarn in a lacy pattern from this book (which is quite good, it has written and diagrammed patterns, which is nice). It's the first piece with a label attached!



It's on a tree! This is the first tag I've put up that fits around a normal-sized tree! Very exciting. Sorry for the terrible picture, my camera doesn't seem to like darkness.

On the way back I also stopped my the Michaels dumpster, and found these awesome plastic bucket things:



Ooooh, maybe I could use them for dying yarn, I wonder if they're watertight....

Dumpster diving ftw!