More new things

In addition to the blue cotton from my last post, I have also begun mulling over the possibilities of doing something with all the oddments of handspun yarn I have accumulated since learning to spin 5 years ago, probably something like a Kaffe Fassett design. I pulled out all my yarn bits and sorted them into a big pile, adding, subtracting, etc to get the pile you see here. I had done some pillows in the past year using Kaffe's magic ball technique and really liked them (the pillows pictured here are both done that way - one using Kaffe's Poppies pattern, and the 2nd in my own design of enlarged houndstooth checks)) and the leftover magic ball is the last picture. For the magic ball, break off varying lengths of yarn in colours that change as you please and tie them together into one long, continuous new yarn. Wind into a ball and knit merrily away; it's like making your own self-striping yarn without having to do the dying myself. Yes, it leaves tons of knots and ends on the back but for a pillow I didn't care about the ends - I just left them on the inside as an extra bit of padding for the pillow.

But for now I want to do something different so I'm playing with some other of Kaffe's patternings to combine into my own design for a vest. It's still in the gestation phase but I think it will have some life in it very soon.