robknits

Baby sweater

It is done.  Here is a bad picture of it.

It really came out pretty good.  I am less than thrilled with the button band, but I figure little Laura will outgrow it before her mom notices anything wonky.  If she hasn't outgrown it already.

Whew.  So glad that is done.  The sweater itself was so easy, and it was nice to be knitting with all wool yarn again.

What I have done is turn massively toward spinning, especially with drop spindles, so I have a lot to report there.  The last post showed the results of a spinning project that will combine plies of different yarn.  That project is still on track.

I also went back to another spinning project, one that lives in the tv room.  I have been spinning rather than knitting during the rare times I have found myself in front of the tv lately.  The fiber is merino in a lovely colorway called Morning glory.  This is what it looked like when I first started spinning it.

The problem was the thread kept breaking and my spindle kept hitting the floor.  I finally realized that the spindle must have been too heavy for the thin thread I was spinning.  So I tried a really light -- .05 oz spindle -- and things took off.  This is what I have now.

No more breaking threads with the lighter spindle (the one on the left).

But the spindling bug really bit, and I bought some more fiber.  I bought this stuff from FiberArtemis:

Isn't it gorgeous?  It is a blend of merino, silk, bamboo and a synthetic called angelina that adds some glitz.  As I spun it, i decided it was spinning up really brown.  Well, yeah Rob.  So I bought, and just got, some gorgeous tonal gold silk top, that I will spin separately and ply with this.

So I am spinning the green stuff on a small Turkish spindle, and the Morning glory merino and the small drop spindle, and the brown and gold stuff on a heavier drop spindle.  That's really enough spinning projects.  But then I saw this at All the Pretty Fibers:

Merino silk batts in cobalt blue.  There was no possible way to resist.  But there is a new rule that I have to finish at least one of my current spinning projects before I can start another.  I am already almost finished with the first brown and gold batt.  The morning glory merino -- well, let's just say I will be spinning that for some time to come.

 

Mea culpa

I slipped off the blogging schedule very soon after establishing it.  I have some excuses, but they are truly excuses.

• I have not finished the damn button band on the baby cardigan. 

When I stop on a project it is always because of a change in the process.  I have to just get a grip and do this or the baby will outgrow the sweater before she gets it.  Avoidance, however, creates more avoidance.

• I killed the keyboard on my laptop.

I was drinking peppermint tea while at my laptop, reached for two different things while not paying attention and drowned the keyboard.  So I put together a Frankenputer, with an external USB keyboard.  That worked well for a day or two, and then other functions on the computer began to die.  I grumbled for a few days, then bought myself a new laptop.  I actually like it very much but all this distracted me from the buttonband and from blogging.  Yup, that's what didi it.

• I had a recurrence of a trigger finger on my left hand. 

Having my fingers curled toward my palm did lead to a delay in typing, knitting and spinning.  Getting an injection into the palm of my hand to release the trigger finger left me whimpering all that weekend, though now the finger is almost back to normal.

• I procrastinate on everything.

I did however get some procrastination knitting done.  Procastination knitting is when you knit something to avoid knitting something else.  As usual, for me, the procrastination knitting is a sock.  Not, of course, from the shoebag full of sock yarn stash.  Not from either of the two new skeins of sock wool I bought at the Kid n Ewe festival.  Instead, I started knitting a skein of yarn I found at Michaels.  Turns out they carry the Patons Kroy sock yarn and had a very nice version they call FX.  The sock is knitting up extremely quickly and so far fits very well. 

 

One of othe reasons socks are good procrastination knitting for me is that I start with a generic sock, and thus no thinking or planning is required.  I did my favorite super-easy turkish cast on, which I now can do using only one circular needle, knit really quickly to the point where I start my increases, and then did the Fleegle heel.  I love Fleegle's heel, which does short rows without any wrapping or picking up.  The sock is now past the ankle and I have chosen a simple pattern stitch for the calf.  I am left though with a mystery that happens whenever I do the Fleegle heel -- even though I think I have used up all the increased stitches, I obviously don't and always end up with more stitches at the ankle than I had at the foot.  Not a problem, since I keep trying on the sock and it fits, but one of these days when my brain is functioning at full speed I will have to sit down and figure out how it is that I do not work off all the increased stitches.  Anyway, then I found a stitch I liked for the calf, and I am still picking it up and working a few rows at a time.  But mostly I have been spinning.

 For some reason I am running into beginner problems with the yarn I showed off in my last post, so I gave up in some frustration a couple of times.  Somehow I wasn't getting enough twist into it (after all this time successfully spinning this stuff) and so the yarn kept drifting apart.   It's funny that I am having trouble with basic wool spinning on the wheel, since the silk spinning on the drop spindle is going very well.

I finished one ounce of it, and spinning it on a Turkish spindle, on which you wind the yarn around the arms, means when it is done you have a nice center-pull ball of yarn.

So I put away the other ounce I have of this stuff, and started spinning an ounce's worth of this:

This is a batt of alpaca, silk and bamboo.  Spinning it is a joy in a tactile sense -- it just feels amazing.  The change in fiber sometimes causes a bit of a bump or knot in the yarn I am spinning, but in general it is going well.  See:

 

The goal is to ply together the silk from the first picture with this yarn.  I think it is going to be gorgeous.

I tried to postpone blogging so that I would be compelled to finish the buttonband, but that sort of negative pressure never works for me.  So I am blogging even though the sweater is not complete.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Making yarn

Spinning

The spinning bug re-bit hard, and I have been spending a lot of time trying to improve my spinning skills.  If you put too much twist in the yarn, it looks like, well, technically it's called yarn barf. 

But too little twist in the yarn and the fiber drifts apart.  When I sat down with this fiber that I had started spinning years ago, I ended up with a considerable amount that I can't ply -- it is underspun in spots and so it comes apart in my hands.  So I began paying more attention, and sure enough, I now have a sizable hank of two-ply yarn:

 

Still a little thick and thin, but usable. 

I plied another bobbin's worth and have a lot more of the fiber to spin too.   

I also started spinning the silk and tencel fiber on the new Turkish spindle, both purchased, as I mentioned in my last post, at the Kid n Ewe fiber festival last weekend.  This fiber, instead of being combed "top," that looks like this,

 

is a "carded batt" and looks like this:

 

They are produced differently.  Top is produced by combing the fibers so that they lay parallel to each other.  A bat is produced on a carding machine and is lighter and full of air.  The fibers are not all lined up either.  This batt, made of silk and tencel, is so airy.  I grab a handful to spin and it is truly like grabbing air.  The only difficulty I am having is with the joins.  When you join one handfull of fluff to the end of the yarn on your spindle or wheel, the unspun fibers at both ends grab each other as you draft them together.  This stuff is so slippery that the joins are a bit trickier.  I am really enjoying this and am sorry I didn't buy a lot more of it.  I bought 2 1-oz packages -- and I will learn soon how much yarn I managed to make from it.  That is always hard to estimate, especially if you do not do a lot of spinning.  It depends of course on how thick you make the yarn.  You can see that I am going for a thin single, and will double it (ply it). 

 

This spindle, a Turkish style spindle, is neat because if you wind the new yarn around it properly as you spin it (under one arm and over two) when you are done you can pull the arms out and have a ready-made center-pull ball of yarn.   Sorry about the dark pictures of the silk and tencel -- we are having one of San Antonio's few gray days.

I discovered that my right hand got tired using the Turkish spindle.  You have to spin it like a top from the top of the shaft.  So yesterday I pulled out another spinning project which uses a top whorl spindle.  I get that spinning but using a thigh spin -- rolling the spindle up my right thigh.  Much less tiring, and I got a lot done last night.  The fiber is merino wool, in a color called Morning Glory from Spinnerette.

The spindle is one I bought at last year's Kid n Ewe.  Unfortunately the maker is no longer making spindles, because I would have bought another this year.

 

Knitting

I am still hung up on the button bands on Laura's baby cardigan, but I did buy buttons yesterday.  I am going to try to finish the button bands today. 

 So the next knitting project for me has to be chosen.  It might be the Quercus cardigan, because that is also top down, though more complicated than the baby sweater.  The baby sweater is top down with raglan sleeves, which is very easy to do top down.  Quercus is top down with set in sleeves, which doesn't appear to be difficult but I think will take a bit of attention. Plus, I will have to follow charts for the cables.  So it will be a mindful, not a mindless, knitting project.  But I sure do want to wear it.  Of course, I might also turn to finish the knit kimono I put aside last winter and finish that up fast.  That'd feel good.  That and the alpaca shawl, assuming the moths haven't gotten to them.  I am afraid to look.

Fiber festival and the moth wars

First, a grim notice: more casualties in the moth wars.  Investigation showed another pair of handmade socks has suffered moth-related fatalities.  During that investigation, it was discovered that the owner of these socks had worn right through the sole of another pair. 

Kim, a good friend with a truly impressive sock yarn stash, offered to send new supplies.  A friend in need is a friend indeed.  However

I have some sock yarn.  I am going to go through each batch today, looking for signs of moths.  Then each batch will go in a zip-lock baggie and into the freezer for a week.   Just to make sure.

But, given the casualties, and the timing of the Kid n Ewe n Llamas Too festival this weekend in Boerne TX, I had license to buy some sock yarn.  I did keep things under control.  Two new skeins of sock yarn (which will immediately go into zip lock bags) found their way into my big red going-to-a-fiber-festival bag.  First item found and purchased was a skein of sock yarn from Alisha Goes Around.  This is her Tittering of Magpies yarn, which is merino, nylon and, to my surprise, a bit of metallic.  A very tiny bit.  We will have to see what it is like when knit up.  It is in a lovely subdued/grayed purple.  See?

Sorry for the poor nighttime artificial light photo.

The other skein that decided to join us is from Western Sky Yarns (or is it Western Sky Knits), their Aspen sock yarn with nylon:

Another late night photo.  The colorway is called Eagle Mountain.

See?  I was very restrained, especially in light of all the sock yarn to be had at Kid n Ewe.  For those of you who are familiar with the fiber festivals at Rhinebeck and Maryland Sheep and Wool, let me point out the first difference between those events and Kid n Ewe.

The parking lot, and one of three buildings used for the festival, on Friday afternoon, the opening day of the event.  Today is sure to be busier, but it is nothing like the behemoth events at Rhinebeck and Maryland.  That said, there was a very satisfying amount of fiber, spindles, yarn, looms, spinning wheels and fiber enthusiasts.  There were also some alpacas being kept just outside the State of Texas Apaca Ranchers exhibition hall.

The white one did not want to have her picture taken, and was bleating rather plaintively while I was there.

One of the first booths I visited was Jeri Brock's Woodworks, since I had decided to pick up one of her Turkish style spindles.  Turkish style spindles are unusual, in that you wrap the yarn you are producing around the removable arms of the spindle, with a resulting center pull ball of yarn.  Jeri cuts interesting designs into the larger arm of her spindle, and makes them out of beautiful wood.  I fell in love with, and brought home, a spindle of hers with a weeping willow design in bloodwood, with a cherry wood shaft.

Unassembled:

Assembled:

You can spin using these spindles as drop spindles, suspended from the yarn you are spinning, or as supported spindles, with the pointed end of the shaft resting on a surface like a table or a spinning bowl.  You can spin very short fibers that way, and very soft low-twist yarn as well.

Speaking of which, I explored other-than-wool spinning fiber at the event.  There is of course tons of alpaca and mohair from local producers, but this is South Texas.  I can't even think of touching alpaca and mohair for most of the year.  I found these gorgeous batts of silk and tencel though, and they came home with me to use with the Turkish spindle.

I picked up a couple of patterns.  A nice cardigan pattern called the Willow Breeze Lace Cardigan, and a pattern for a stole done in squares, the Triple S Shawl.  It occured to me that it would be a very nice use of relatively small amounts of handspun yarn.  As usual, what attracted me was seeing the finished products.

I did NOT buy the very interesting spinning wheel I saw there.  It is Spinolution's small travel wheel, called the Hopper.  The spinning sits facing it -- this photo is a side view, so the spinner would be sitting on the left.

Here is a video about how they work.  When they refer to it as an art yarn wheel, they mean you can produce thick, irregular yarns.  The treadle is unusual too, in how you rest your feet on it, rather than using just the ball of your feet.  I really don't need another wheel, I don't need an art yarn wheel, but it is a creative and unusual design.

Spinning

I have been doing a lot of spinning on my Columbine wheel, working my way through the Confetti roving.  I was worried about an itchy spot on my thumb, wondering what it could be, and I actually now think it is due to all the time I am spending running the roving over that thumb as I spin.  I have almost filled a second bobbin, so soon I should be able to start plying.

Knitting

As usual and as I predicted, once I reached the button band, and my fear of button holes, my work on baby Laura's cardigan slowed down.  I do commit to finishing it this weekend though, and there will be an addendum to this post when it happens.

Cats

Maggie in a Maggie-nest.

RUN!!!! MOTHS!!!

I can't think of enough nasty words.  It got cold here.  No, really, down into the 30s one night.  So I pulled on some socks, some lovely, wool, handknit socks.  And then I looked happily at my lovely wool handknit socks....

So unfair.  So cruel.  Really pisses me off.

I found another pair of handknit wool socks in the same drawer, with no holes.  Tomorrow I am mounting a major vacuum-out-the-drawers, closets, walls, carpets event.  All clean woolens will be put in zip-lock bags and, believe it or not, in the freezer for a week.  All wool yarn and fiber -- same process.  It'll take me a while, since the freezer does not have that much empty space, but eventually everything will have been treated and sealed safely away. 

And of course, I will have to knit more socks.  The sock yarn stash will have to be studied carefully for damage.

Knitting

Baby Laura's cardi is almost done.  And this picture even shows how gorgeous the yarn is.

I need to pick up the button band, knit button holes (uh oh) and weave in the ends.  Tomorrow I will run out to find some cute baby buttons.  The uh oh with buttonholes -- it is easy to make buttonholes but they don't always look too good.  Mine don't look too good.  I have to remember that this sweater will fit the baby for a matter of weeks, and remember that no one will remember the button holes.  They have to be functional, so they don't drive my friend Sue crazy.  Nothing more.

The yarn I bought for the Quercus cardigan arrived and I am very pleased.  Usually if I buy yarn online it is something I have had a chance to see and touch in person.  This time I decided to take a chance on one of the Valley Yarns, the store brand for the huge yarn store WEBS.  I read the reviews on Ravelry and decided to take a chance.  The results are very good.  The color, called Denim Heather, is a nice strong color, and the yarn feels nice to the touch without being the sort of texture that pills immediately.  Of course I want to cast on immediately but will finish baby Laura's cardi first.  That baby lives in Buffalo!  She NEEDS a sweater!

Spinning

I am continuing to spin the Confetti I showed you last week.  I also broke down and began using a drop spindle to spin this pretty stuff.

I couldn't resist.  It is too pretty.  I am spinning it on a drop spindle I bought last year at Kid n Ewe festival in Boerne TX, which is taking place again next weekend.  The maker of the spindle, unfortunately for me, actually took a full time job and is no longer making spindles and wheels.  I will have to see if I find other spindles of interest.

Weaving

My drawing class last week gave me an idea on how to handle the sky in the design for the tapestry.  In between bouts of vacuuming, sealing, knitting and spinning, I am going to try it out with pencil on the collage and see if it might work.  If so, I will post about it soon.

Cats

A cry went out for the cats to get their fair share of time on the blog.  I don't have any recent pictures, so here is an old one of Maggie doing her pre-Olympic clothes dryer routine.

Reboot

I have returned... full-speed, to knitting and spinning.  The change in temperature could be a factor, but it started when it was still warm.  Now of course I am sorry I haven't finished all those cardis, because even here in south Texas it has gotten cool

Blog as log

I am going back to my original idea of this blog as a log of my creative project.  It is also a way of organizing all of that as well.  So I am putting myself on a blogging schedule, and a blogging format with subject headings (spinning, knitting, art).  New posts will go up each weekend.

Knitting

Top priority:  A friend of mine suddenly has a new baby.  It was not sudden for her, but I learned about it suddenly.  So  I found a top down raglan baby cardigan with a hood.   This has been a very efficient pattern.  I downloaded the pattern from Patternfish.  I found machine washable yarn (the gorgeous Dream in Color Classy) in my stash.  The first day I knit down from the neck past the armholes.  The second day I finished the body.  The third day a sleeve was finished.  The fourth day the second sleeve was finished.  This weekend I will pick up stitches at the neckband and knit the hood. ( Voila! Hood almost completed.)  A baby sweater that will need buttons and a button band.  I cannot let that stop me.  This baby is growing rapidly in Buffalo NY.

This color is actually Deep Sea Flower, from Dream in Color, a gorgeous color that my camera refuses to capture correctly.  Here is a professional picture of it on the right.

 

This project helped me rediscover my love of knitting sweaters from the top down.  All in one piece with no seaming is good.  Top down is even better.  Unfortunately most top-down sweaters have raglan sleeves, which is not a good look for me.  But not all of them, and I am collecting how-tos and patterns for top-down set-in sleeves.  One new pattern (for which I have already purchased yarn) is Quercus, in the first fall Knitty online magazine. (First fall always sounds like the hobbits' first breakfast.)  This sweater is knit from the neck down, and the stitches for the sleeves are picked up and knit down as well.  I do have to figure out how to modify the front, since I want to add a way to close this cardi with something other than a shawl pin, and I think lengthen the sleeves.

Other knitting: The knitted kimono jacket. I put this project away last spring when I had already finished the back and both fronts.  My goal is to finish this as soon as I get baby Laura's sweater done.

Spinning

I was suddenly thinking about spinning again, so finally, 3 and a half years after moving to San Antonio, I sat down at my Columbine spinning wheel and went back to spinning this fiber.  Now I can't stop.  I have filled a bobbin and started on a second.   The fiber, bought years ago from the Copper Moose, is a combed wool top with bits of different colored thread in it.  Here it is before it is spun,   and in a spun single.  My final goal is a two-ply yarn. 

 

 

 

Still unable to stop thinking about spinning, I sat down with the lovely spindle I bought last year at the Kid n Ewe festival in Boerne TX, and some gorgeous merino top, and began spinning that as well.  Just in time for this year's Kid n Ewe festival to be held in two weeks.

Art

I am taking another beginning drawing class at the Southwest School of Art.  This is the third time, so at some point I am going to have to decide to move on to another course.  Most of the other courses in the drawing/painting tracks move on to other media, like pastels or painting, so I might move on too.  I am finally seeing a change in my drawing but of course the most important part of developing that change is also the most difficult -- drawing a lot, every day.

Weaving

I have a design for a tapestry that I did as a collage.  It involves a lot of sky, and that is tricky, since you have to decide what is going to make up that sky, in terms of color and weaving techniques.  The first idea I had is based on circles but circles in tapestry are very very difficult.  So I may have to come up with another idea.  And "sample" it -- weave a little bit of it to test the technique and the colors before actually trying to use it on the tapestry itself.  More to come.

Still here

Obviously the redesign of this blog has not yet happened.  Temperatures continue to go past 100 degrees on a daily basis, work has gotten very challenging and I come home and lie in front of the fan, obsessively playing Scrabble on my Kindle.  Not much creative work is being done chez Rob.   Actually, it is not quite accurate to say I am lying in front of the fan.  The air conditioning is on, laboring mightily to cool my 54-year old house, the ceiling fan is on, and I turn a small tabletop fan directly on me.  Then I am comfortable.  But it means I tend to stay in one place, and don't get very active.  I am developing cabin fever.

Most Saturday mornings I go to my drawing class and have a great time there.  It is a roller coaster emotionally, since some days I produce things I find interesting and other days I appear to be starting from scratch again.  I remind myself that the same was true of learning to knit.  And that I knitted obsessively for years, but have not yet developed the habit of drawing between classes.  One very useful book, Twila Tharp's The Creative Habit, stresses the foundational productive role that structure, work habits, warm ups and routines have on creativity.  So I am trying to get into the habit of sitting down to draw just as I have for years sat down to knit.  The room I use as a studio/craft room gets hot in the afternoon sun, which works against this practice right now.  On the other hand, I went outside to spray a pastel painting I did with a substitute teacher a few weeks ago.  The instructions on the fixative say to use in temperatures between 55 and 85 degrees F, and not to use in humid conditions.  They could have just said not to use it in the state of Texas.  I used it on the back porch anyway, and will bring the painting inside in a bit to hope that it dries in the semi-air conditioned house.

And, surprisingly enough, in this week of 103 degree heat, I started knitting again.  A cute cropped cardigan, Berroco's Bianca, perfect to wear indoors over the sleeveless long dresses I wear in this heat, in some yarn I have had in the stash.  I am of course knitting it in a very different yarn.  The cardi is knit up the fronts, stitches added for sleeves, decreased, and then knit down the back.  Easy peasy.  So of course I am thinking of knitting it in pieces, adding darts to the front, adding shoulder sleeves, modifying the sleeves...  which also means I will never finish it.  So I may take the risk of knitting it more or less as written, even if I suspect that a cardi with no shoulder seams and sleeves that are part of the bodice is not going to fit very well.   Oh, and I will make it with shorter sleeves, 3/4 length at most.  That change will be easy.

This is more or less the fabric being produced.  It is actually lighter than in this picture, and someday, if I find my camera, I will get better pictures up on this blog.The yarn is Artful Yarns Olympic, a rayon, acrylic and cotton blend.  The color name is Mexico City, so of course I had to buy it.  It has been in the stash for quite a while.  I think I will relax about the finished product, and just enjoy the knitting.  As long as the fan is blowing directly on my face.

I am dripping sweat onto my keyboard, so it is time to find a cooler spot in the house.  To be brave, I am posting here a quick sketched portrait of a classmate in my drawing class:

 
A redesign of this blog is coming.  Really.  Probably after the heat breaks, and I am ready to teach the course I was asked to teach at the last minute, and I finish Bianca, and I do some drawing, and I finish the needlepoint I am working on, and maybe warp the loom...

 

Inspiration on Inspiration Drive

Lately when I tell people my address, I explain that I am trying to live up to the name of my street.  Another source of inspiration lately has been the drawing class I am taking at the Southwest School of Art with teacher Sylvia Benitez.  I finally feel as if I have some (very basic) drawing skills and have even been inspired to draw at home, between Saturday classes. 

On the other hand, I began to wonder if I am done with knitting.  Then I realized that, well, it is going to be 101 degrees out there today.  It has been in the 90s for months already.  I enjoyed knitting with the Origami yarn even if I am not sure I would wear the shawlette I made, and so after about a month of not knitting I have done a review of the hot-weather yarn I have in the stash.  I wear cool shirts or cropped mesh boleros over tank tops in this heat, so I decided I can use some of the light, non-wool yarns I have to make some of those.  That includes some  ribbon that has been in the stash forever (Berocco's Denim Silk) , and other longstanding stash items like Artful Yarns Olympic, Lavold's Hempathy in bright Cavansite blue, and some others.  So you might yet see some knitting on this site.

At the same time, I am thinking of making some changes on the blog.  One of my favorite art magazines, Fiberarts, has ceased publicaton as of this current issue.  That means I will have to do some more directed searching out of interesting fiber-based artwork.  Interweave is offering to substitute issues of Quilting Arts to finish out subscriptions, but I am not as interested in quilting-related art as I once was.  Other magazines that might fill in some of that gap is Shuttle Spindle Dyepot, produced by the Handweavers Guild, though I have never found that quite as satisfying as Fiberarts, or the UK Journal for Weavers, Spinners, Dyers.   And bits and pieces of Quilting Arts, the Surface Design Association, the Textile Museum website, the Museum of Art and Design (MAD) website ... but keeping up with what is going on is going to take more work on my part.  So I am going to be sharing whatever I find on the blog as well.  So the first thing I will do is send you back to the Judy Chicago/Audrey Cowan tapestry exhibit at MAD -- http://collections.madmuseum.org/code/emuseum.asp?emu_action=advsearch&rawsearch=exhibitionid/%2C/is/%2C/534/%2C/true/%2C/false&profile=exhibitions .

Renegade Craft fair

(This is a review of the Renegade Craft Fair in Austin Tx.  As such, what I will be doing is expressing my opinion.  I can do that. )

I went up to Austin today and a friend and I went to the Renegade Craft Fair.  If you follow that link, you will see it happens in several major cities and in Austin.  As they say on their About page: "RCF is held yearly in urban epicenters of creative indie-entrepreneurship."  Well, that kind of describes Austin, doesn't it.  But I was surprised to read this after coming home from the fair:

Each individual fair is juried from hundreds of applications to purposefully feature a curated, eclectic array of young and emergent designers producing original and handmade goods in a wide variety of media. We feature artists with a DIY (do-it-yourself) background – creating innovative work using traditional craft methods, but not based on preexisting patterns or products.

Really?  Because that is not what I saw in Austin.  There were many t-shirt booths, some with funny sayings, some with stamped-on designs.  I saw one with a branch-like design that I liked very much.  I saw two leather bag booths that were creative and interesting.  My friend bought a beautiful necklace of quartz and other stones.  A few of the ceramics booths had some interesting items.  But my friend described most of what we saw as very commercial, in the sense that most of the items for sale were "assembled" (her term) from commercially available materials for quick sales.  Lots of onesies with stamped-on designs. Finger puppets crocheted in acrylic.  I did see one booth that looked like fun, in which hoodies for kids looked like characters from Where the Wild Things Are.  I guess my complaint is that the fair did not seem like an event "juried from hundreds of applications to purposefully feature a curated, eclectic array of young and emergent designers producing original and handmade goods in a wide variety of media."  We saw much more non-traditional, original, handmade goods at the Handweavers Guild show in Houston last fall, where my friend bought a beautiful nuno-felted stole.  And at the Arts Fest during Fiesta at the Southwest School of Art, where I scored a pair of gorgeous earrings made with colored pencil on metal.  Unfortunately, there was nothing renegade about the Renegade Craft Fair in Austin.

Aaaah!

Well the world did not end at 6 pm, or at least not so I noticed, so instead I finished the Origami shawlette.

I have some doubts about this shawlette, particularly about how it does not yet come to a point where it should, but I haven't blocked it yet.  I don't think I will be wearing it as a shawlette anyway, but will let it roll and wear it more like a scarf.  But I really have to consider more small projects, since I finished this in 10 days.  And all those cardigans are still waiting to be finished, months if not years after they were started.  So I might raid the stash and start another scarf.  I do still have to figure out how to handle yarn ends with this cotton, nylon, acrylic and I-forget-what yarn, and I think I will steam it to finish it up.

And it rained.  Gently, mildly, which is good, since as a colleague of mine once told me, the climate around here is one of chronic drought interrupted by floods.  No floods, and of course we need more rain.  But it might be on the way.