Knitting Dragonflies

Last year I bought some lovely fiber from a fiber festival. It was so soft, the kind of fiber you pick up and just want to rub and snuggle with. Then I had a day off, and some sunshine, I pulled my wheel out onto the deck, even with a cool breeze and my jacket on it was a pleasure to sit and spin. The Fiber is: Screaming Wild Monkey! A special house blend of 70% super wash merino/15% Banana/!5% Seacell (impregnated with silver) 4 oz. (what ever this means!!??) Did that stop me from buying it? Oh no. The photo doesn’t show the colors, they are vibrant. made by River’s Edge Weaving Studio at  weavingstudio.com It was a dream to spin! I spun it up fairly quickly. After some consideration I decided to try my hand at Navajo Plying. I used this You Tube video from Rexenne on Navajo Plying , she has quite a personality, and the video is very through, even including slow motion. After plying I was amazed at the difference in the color!! Plying in the Navajo style with multicolored single

I’m still slogging along with my Iced sweater from Knitty . After an alarming number of frogs and ciphering, I am cautiously on a roll. Yes you would think with yarn this bulky, that this sweater would be done in a week. Me too! I started with this lovely yarn that I purchased for another pattern, sound familiar? How many times do I do this? It laid around and mocked me for some time. I just wasn’t happy with the pattern that I originally bought for it. Of course the yarn being rather super bulky, it was hard to find another pattern to fit my needs. Enter Knitty Fall 2010 Iced Sweater by Carol Feller . I feel in love with it and had to have it. Well,,,,,,I didn’t want to buy more yarn, so I decided I would “force” this yarn into behaving itself began and perilous journey. Getting Gauge: not going to happen, the knitting gods laughed at me…Frogged Getting Gauge second try: still laughing, and do I detect some snorting?….Frogged Begin knitting, I’m blindly knitting along, tightly

I’ve never been able to find some buttons that I thought looked good on this sweater! I’ve tried wood, metal with design, and various plastic. Finally I thought I would try to make some myself. Above is my Lion Neck Cardigan , with my buttons sewn on! I modified the pattern collar, see my rav link above. This was a fun top down pattern by Wendy Bernard. I decided to make some more buttons with engraved branches on them, and some larger buttons to paint on. Here are my buttons, ready to go into the oven. I roughly scratched some branches and leaves with a toothpick. And then made the button holes by sticking a cuticle stick into the back and front and smoothing the hole out. I made 5 buttons with branches on them for my sweater. Lion Neck Cardigan. (amazon book link) I rubbed in with my hands a acrylic green, using the paint brush to really make sure it got into all of the little cracks. Too green! So I added a burnt umber to my glaze and washed it over it. (I did this by us