Knitting Dragonflies

Knitting always sooths me, I was stressed and needed a small project, out of town with little resources. I had one knitting book and found a Joanns store. After much looking around and dithering, some yarn was found that I fell in love with a wool, mohair, acrylic mix!  Patons North America Lace ,I decided to buy two balls, because, well who knows what it would become? Only having one knitting book gave me few options, Greetings from the Knit Café , so I picked out the Lale shawl and started in. The pattern is super simple and goes fast due to the yo’s and then drop them the next row! This would be a good first shawl for a beginning knitter! Love how the yarn is giving the color change and lacy look with a slight halo. Pattern is very easy to follow, once you knit one repetition of it, you can go on auto pilot with it.I knitted most of it during visiting friends for a music festival. So little attention to detail, and lots of talking involved. I’m always surprised at how many knit

Winter winds, snow and ice? That translates to lots of knitting. I had a birthday to knit for and a couple of skeins of Hometown USA by Lion Brand. I was drawn to this yarn due to the extreme softness, it just made me squeeze the skeins and the vibrant colors, and then noticed that it was 100% Acrylic. I’ll be the first one to tell you, I hardly ever knit with a yarn that does not have some natural fiber in it, but this felt so tempting I couldn’t resist. I usually buy Wool Ease Chunky with a fiber content of 20% Wool and 80% Acrylic, but kept going back to this one. I just couldn’t stop touching it. It is a super bulky yarn at 9 sts x 12 rows per 4 square inches. Available in 63 colors, the solids and multis are 100% acrylic, and the Tweeds are 94% acrylic and 6% Rayon (due to the tweed bits). I decided to try it out, as I had fallen in love with the Tampa Spice color, I thought it would  be perfect for my birthday gal. I wanted a Cowl pattern, and loved the look of the seed st

Winter weather has been crazy this year! Seems like warm to cold temps. Coldest temps I’ve seen in a long time. What better to get everyone in a great knitting mood! I wanted an easy shawl pattern to high light the handspun yarn. It was my first time that I spun a pound of fiber, I picked out an unlikely color (for me) because I tend to look at my stash and it is all blue. Pumpkin or persimmon colored Blue Faced Leicester fleece ! I splurged on a pound and wanted to see how much yardage I would get from it. I spun it up and plied it, It ended up giving me approximately 700-800 yards or so. It looked a little matt or dull to me, so my girlfriend suggested that I added a strand of something else. I picked out a spool of Sulky thread in the blendable colors, it did take 3 spools, I ran my plied yarn back through the wheel and loosely added the thread. The result gave it just enough dimension to make me happy. Large enough to wrap around your body in the house, in a chilly office. Yet