Wordless Wednesday - Not Fiber-Obsessed? Me?

Not that I'm fiber-obsessed or anything. Noooo. But I thought I'd share some of my Etsy favorites at the moment.

Treasures and Treasuries

I went motorcycle riding all over Knoxville today, in pursuit of sunflower and olive oils for Richard to make soap from. My 13 yod Diantha rode with me. Riding with her on the back is like riding with a feather. She probably weighs almost 100# but you would almost never know she is there. We visited Des and helped her with some quilting and laundry and holding Hannah, who is the same temperament as Diantha. She is kind of fussy and clingy but I told Des not to worry, Diantha outgrew that about 2 months ago. LOL!! Those girls are treasures to me, however fussy. With a little luck, that doesn't last forever.

I got a T West with some bling, just for fun! I let Diantha pick it out...
ring a ding bling

And my HUSBAND actually got a T West, too!
Manly Pursuits

And THANK YOU to mompotter of the SHE team (of which I am now a member) for including a yarn from my my7kids shop in her T west also!
SHEteam is beautiful

Visit these treasuries and click on the items... leave a comment and we'll see if any of the collections can make the Etsy front page!

Just in Case You're Nosy

Here are a few of my favorites in my Etsy shop Right now.



I am off, to run around with hubby today. We need to look at cheap windows and carpet at Knox Rail Salvage, and a 9mm Bersa Thunder at a gun shop on the far side of town. And maybe hit a couple thrift stores... I am sure there are sweaters out there just WAITING for me to defile them.

DRAWING WINNER!

Congratulations are in order to Beatblack, who is the winner of my drawing! She chose my "Baby Jesus" yarn! Beautiful!

You can check out her own Etsy shop at

BeatBlack.etsy.com
and her blog, at

Beat Black

This is the way I did it: I put the entries all in the List Randomizer at Random.org, generating a randomly scrambled list of 41 entries. I asked my kids to pick a number between one and 20 (I was thinking of 13). The one who came closest (Diantha, with 14) got to pick a number between 1 and 41. She chose 38. So entry number 38 on the randomized list was the winner!

As a THANK you for all who entered, I am offering free shipping to you during December on any orders from either Etsy shop, my7kids or HeartFeltFun. Just convo me prior to order so that I can adjust the shipping on the listings, or I can rebate the shipping back to you via Paypal. If you choose to do it that way, please put the code ShipDec08 in the comment box.

BRRRR!

I thought it would be such a shame to deprive the world of any views of my new ride. So I have added them to yesterday's post, below (please go see! I LOVE this bike! I had forgotten how much until we started it up and I nearly cried!) Definitely not the weather to ride! It is freezing tonight! Guess I will have to go start it up every day and hear it run, just to do my heart good (and keep the gas from turning to varnish).

I love to quilt, but when the weather gets like this, I want to knit. Today I completed another ski band, and spun up about half the Happy Begonia Batt I got from Maisie Handspun off etsy. I took the batt with me to church (left it in the car, don't worry!) and played with it afterward when I went to my sister's to collect one of my kids that Des had borrowed. Which makes my sister mad. The spinning, not the kid borrowing. My sister doesn't have any hobbies besides watching TV, even though dd#1 and I have offered to teach her (ANYthing!). But she gets mad if we bring our knitting or spinning to her house. I can only tolerate so much idle sitting, watching a glowing screen. [shrug] And Des spent the DAY there today, while her dh is building a platform for their bed in the garage. So, we brought our hobbies.

Today I listed 3 new yarns: Another Shepherd / Joseph, Mary's Righteous Husband / and Nestor, the Donkey that Carried Mary. Another Shepherd and Nestor are both made from an Irish Heathers hand-knitted and seamed sweater. They were natural brown sheep wool, which I hand dyed. Gorgeous! Joseph was a beautiful blue sweater, a 2-ply sock weight, one ply navy blue and one a lighter blue tweed.

I also listed an ear warmer/ski band/headband
in my HeartFeltFun shop. I hand knitted it from yarn I got from FeltStudiosUK on etsy... a 2-ply hand dyed, handspun Falkland wool in beige, tan, brown, sage green, light gray, and a little blue. I knitted in subtle diamonds and I think it is beautiful!

A "GO-GREEN FOR THE HOLIDAYS" GIVEAWAY!

OK, so in the interest of Raising Green Awareness for the Holiday season, and Goodwill Toward Mankind, I have decided to run a Giveaway, Sweepstakes, Drawing, Free Raffle if you will. Here is the Deal:

Visit either of my shops,
Recycled, hand dyed, high-end fiber yarns at my7kids -or-
Recycled, felted and hand-knitted items at HeartFeltFun. Either of these links will open a new window!

Then come back here and comment on two things:

1) Your favorite item from either shop and Why

2) ONE way your family can "Go Green" for the Holidays.

Please also include your email address in a non-harvestable form, like Youremailaddy AT yourserver DOT com

For instance, for probably 20 years, I have started in about September to save boxes, anything an interesting size and not smooshed, to wrap presents in. We have given CDs wrapped in toaster pastry boxes to handknitted sweaters in corndog boxes to wallets in checbook boxes. Always fun to unwrap the box to see what you "got" and then open the box to see what you REALLY got. LoL!

Miscellaneous Stuff:

No Purchase Necessary to win. If you find something you can't live without in my shops, good for you, and good for me. But no obligation!

Etsy membership NOT required to win. (But what the heck)

Contest ends midnight EST (Greenwich +5) on 12/01/08

ONE entry per person.

There will be ONE person to win. I will use Random.org to draw.

Winner gets to select ONE item of their choice from one shop, value up to $18

Winner's name will be posted on my blog sometime on 12/02/08 (I'd like to specify a time of the morning, but I am a little unstructured in that area)

Winner must respond by midnight 12/04/08 to my personal email, with their item preference and mailing address. If the winner fails to respond, I will choose another winner.

ONE extra entry for each of the following actions: Follow me, Link to this giveaway, Subscribe, Blog about this blog, purchase. Please let me know by comment if you did any of these things.

Too, too busy ~and~ LOTSA pics!

Marion wrote about me on Saturday!
Knittingspinningsewingcrocheting: Fun Stuff!!!

Ok, I have gotten not much of anything done for 5 days. My baby Betsy has had intermittent fever and has kept me up all night. Saturday and Sunday my oldest daughter Desiree and her dh Tony were here all day each, because Tony was helping my dh re-route water pipes under the house. What fun! 10 to 12 of us in the house at a time and most of the day Sunday, no water! It was like Little House on the Prairie with all the kids running around.

I spun some green bits out of my Batt Crazies, along with some bits and nepps that I collected out of the dryer when I felted some sweaters, and dyed various shades of red (talk about recycling! to make the weirdest lumpy yarn. I only got 19 yards. sigh! But then I plied it with some Red eyelash and attached little frosty plastic mini Christmas ornaments that look like candies. I am calling it Trip To Candyland, and I think I will knit it as an accent band in an otherwise green or deep red hat.


I have been trying to catch up with some quilt swaps I have been in. And Des and I spent part of Saturday and a lot of Sunday spinning. She dove feet first into my Batt Crazies and helped me spin the rest of them. I just love this yarn! The pic is left to right: The one Des spun on her own, the one we spun together, and the first one, that I spun alone. Gorgeous, gorgeous. Soft as a feather too.
I am going to knit a Moebius wrap with them, probably after Christmas if I can muster up enough Self-Control to keep to my gift list and keep my hands off this yarn. LoL.

Then she got a black merino/blue bamboo batt of 3 oz and spun that whole thing up. You can see she did a great job. Boy she took right to this spindling thing.

Today I got two GORGEOUS spindles in the mail from Marion (link to her Saturday blog above). One is pictured with Des' black and blue yarn. On the other, you can see that I already started spinning something. I had in mind to ply this red, green, and yellow yarn with a gold thread and call it Holly's Jollies, but I think I am spinning it too fine. If I can get a little thicker I might. Unless I change my mind and call it Cinco De Decembre!

Alas, I only got ONE yarn done today to list on etsy. I am so sorry to people who are waiting for something new to appear in my shop! I had hoped to get 2 or 3 done. But we are retiling a countertop in my kitchen, so that is a mess. And my elderly MIL and my oldest BIL will be here tomorrow from NJ for a visit. Since I am already "fat" in their book, (OMG when we were there to visit in June she must have told me 6 times how much I have LET MYSELF GO since Betsy was born last year!) I didn't want to be a "fat SLOB" too... so we have been cleaning.

The ONE skein I did do, when I went to reskein it to mix the colors, the last 100 yards or so got tangled and I spent an hour and a half untangling it. OY! Took up the time I could have used to do 2 more skeins anyway!

So this yarn is the Dolly for Sue from the Island of Misfit Toys from Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. According to any info I could find on the 'net, Dolly isn't there because she is truly a misfit, mostly King Moonracer the Lion brought her there just because nobody loves her anymore. Boo-hoo! Well I hope someone will LOVE her yarn! LOL!

So here I am

Once again NOT doing yarn today. Well that is, not doing recycled yarn. My BIL called wanting to borrow Artemas' muscles. I had to go out to the PO, so of course I should drop Muscleman off at their house and haul all the rest of us to my oldest daughter's for a day of sewing, eating, and all kinds of other fun.

We usually go there on Wed. nights while a couple of my kids are at youth group. It is closer to her house from our church than back to mine (12 miles instead of almost 20) so we go hang out a while, let the kids all play together, exclaim over babies, make dinner, knit a little while together.

But now it is dark earlier, so it was fun to go earlier tonight and let the kids play on the playground out in the circle of apartment buildings. And it gave us more time to play with quilt blocks, yarn, and a spindle.

DD #1 has decided she wants to ply some fabric with some handspun yarn and bits of stuff to make "art yarn" for an upcoming project. So she figured she should play with a spindle to see if she could actually spin something.

I had brought along a spindle and a batt of Blue Jeans merino that I got from The Ranch at Etsy, along with some Cotswold locks I had hand-dyed. Granted merino isn't the best yarn to learn to spin on, it is slippery. I had in mind that I was going to spin it. But hey, I love it when my kids want to learn something new! I spun a little to show her the movements and turned her loose. She sure did spin up the entire 4 oz. of that batt, into what looks to me like darn good yarn for a beginner.

So Congrats Desirée, and here is a pic of your diligent evening's work.

And, dd#2 made chocolate chip cookies. Yummmmm!

Resistance is FUTILE!

I have LONG resisted doing a blog. I kind of subscribe to the theory that all of cyberspace isn't out there waiting with 'bated breath for my latest deep (or not so deep) thoughts on ANYthing. And, I very rarely read anyone else's blog, because, well,
--6 kids still at home that I homeschool
--Quilting, and 4 kids at home who quilt or want to quilt or need help quilting
--Unraveling sweaters and dyeing, which takes up a great proportion of my time
--about 20 loads of laundry a week
--several meals a day
--my walking habit
--my knitting habit
--my dh, who is but a big old child himself
--I have trouble enough remembering to read my Bible, let alone drivel on the internet (which I feel wastes more than its share of my time).

And, not bragging or anything, but I have so many creative ideas and outlets, that if I did nothing but stay busy all day creating things and got only 6 hours sleep a night for the rest of my life, I could not do it all. In fact my oldest daughter (now a mom of 2 herself) told me once I should write a book called Quilts I Will Never Make (and sequels, Garments I Will Never Knit, Yarns I Will Never Spin, etc). Not that I can do that anyway, because even as I write, my 18mod is climbing me, fussing with teething and hanging on me like a leech. Sometimes I think if I ever meet up with what I call my Sadistic Psycho Muse, I will take to her with a rotary cutter (or the nearest pointy implement).

But I have been told lately, that since I make these recycled yarns for sale on Etsy, and since I do them in series of (mostly literary) characters, that I should blog about why I choose a certain work or characters and how I choose which fiber should represent them and what colors I think their personalities are. You know, kind of give a glimpse of the thought processes behind what I am doing.

So for all its worth here I am, going to let you in on my innermost thoughts. If I can remember my log-in...