New year and new blog entries.

 I forgot I had this blog for knitting that started in 2009. A lot has happened since then and for a while I wasn't doing any knitting due to circumstances and stuff. Well I'm back to knitting again but most of my things are still in storage. First off some pictures (since I know how to do that now and have the capability to upload pictures).

Just a few things I've accomplished in the past three months. Wrist warmers/fingerless gloves for me out of Touch of Alpaca from Lion Brand (now discontinued). Two hats (plus about four more that were duds and will be frogged) for the grandboys for Christmas and finished a scarf and gave that to my other grandkid.  

I'm very accomplished at hat making now and figured out that the top down pattern is not for me. None of the ones I started like that turned out well and it's not so much the pattern as the yarns I had on hand to do it. The two hats that succeeded were a 3x3 rib pattern and both hats are from the same ball of Mandala yarn (I think this is Chimera colorway which is also discontinued I think). Plenty of yarn left to do more hats or a scarf from just that ball. The scarf is shorter than it should be and unknown yarn. Possibly Landscapes, but it's not as slick and silky as landscapes. I used a staggered fern pattern and it turned out much prettier in person. 

I have two or three shawls that are in bags, one of which I just untangled and rewound the yarn into a ball. Progress pictures of the winding process.

Final result. Most of the yarn was just caught on itself. The yarn is Shawl In A Ball and the shawl pattern is a really easy quatrifoil(?) eyelet pattern. I must have gotten it out of one of my books somewhere but searches on Ravelry in my library came up with nothing.

I am accomplished enough to figure out the pattern but will take a while and possibly ripping out a row to double check the pattern. My goal for 2024 is to finish or frog most of my projects I have currently handy. I want to make a pair of slippers for my sweetie (yes I found someone to spend the rest of my life with) and use what yarn I have as much as possible.

In other news, there is a new independent yarn dyer that showed up on my feed a few weeks back and the yarns are stunning. Good news is, it's not that expensive initially, bad news is, he is in Canada.

Yarn company is Arcane Fibre Works and he does four different yarn bases from sock to chunky and they are all the same price. He has posted videos with and without narration on the dyeing process which is fascinating and more instructional for people that do their own dyeing. So far I have seen ten colorways I want.  He finds pictures on the internet for inspiration and then comes as close as possible to the colors in the image. Conversion for the cost works out to be $27 USD but then there's the taxes and customs and shipping so it works out to be about $35 per skein but there's no shipping on two or more skeins. So, not in my budget at this time but wonderful to look at and drool over.

That's my catch up post for now. Between this, my garden blog and my personal blog, I will likely be posting this one about once a week maybe once a month depending on how my projects go. Gardening is my first hobby at this point so that gets posts at least every other day. 

So yay for the feeling of progress! Happy New Year Knitting!