Llotis Knitting Needle Gauges and Shetland Pi KAL WIP

Llotis Knitting Needle Gauges are now available for sale in my etsy shop. We have natural wood ones and we also have these purple stained ones. 

All of the needle gauges have a protective beeswax and orange oil wood finishing product applied to them. They measure US knitting needle sizes 000, 00, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10 1/2, 11, 13, 15 & 16. There is a handy WPI (wrap per inch) tool on her neck for measuring your handspun or other yarn.

In more business news Llady Llama Fiber Co. will be vending at Knox Farm Fiber Festival in East Aurora, NY on September 25th from 10am-5pm. If you are in the area please stop by and see us!

In knitting news I've been participating in WendyKnits' Shetland Pi Shawl KAL. I'm using Llady Llama Fiber Co.'s Llore Sock Yarn that I hand-dyed in my favorite color. Yay for being able to actually use some of my yarn! ::grin::

I'm only on the tail end of clue #2, but life is pretty busy right now so I'm not in any rush. I am very pleased with how it is coming out and as always Wendy's patterns are lovely!

Knit Night & Shop Update

In Personal News:

Rach and I had a blast at the festival despite some rainy weather and we even saw two old college friends there! This year's effigy burned on the final night's bonfire was a dragon much to my delight! It was amazingly designed and at the moment of lighting the blaze the wings popped open and fireworks shot off of the dragons body. The dragon's eyes were also fireworks of some kind. The bonfire is several stories high and the sparks filled the night like a whole new set of stars. 

We also spent quite a bit of time hiking and sitting on a wooden bridge by one of the campsite's ponds relaxing and listening to the bullfrogs. I spun quite a bit while we sat there and I'm down to plying my Mom's yarn!

We each attended a workshop and ate maple cotton candy and amazing Mediterranean food from a vendor and shopped too.

On the way to the festival the first day Rach spotted a store called Woolgathering in Brocton (she saw it while she was driving and she's not a fiber freak, isn't she amazing!). 

It wasn't open but when we got home I looked it up and we stopped in the next day on our way back to Brushwood. We chatted with the owner Barb for about an hour and a half! She is an awesome lady and the shop is great! I'm going to start attending Knit Night on Wednesday nights there and I'm super excited! I've been looking for a knitting group for awhile and hadn't found anything less than 45 minutes away. This is only 10 minutes from home!!! Happy Dance!

In Business News:

Kimber from Palm Valley Fibers finished spinning up the Surf Shop roving she purchased from me. It's so amazing to see someone take my product and transform it to make it their own! 

That is what I love about selling roving and yarn-the item I create goes on to become innumerable new objects and creations. The energy I instill in the fiber as I create with it passes on and it added to by whomever spins it, then knits, crochets or weaves it. If the yarn becomes a gift then there is another person in the chain. If the final item is a gift then there is yet another person in the chain. If the item is handed down etc, etc. Not to mention everyone who interacts with the fiber in a more passive way.

 

In other words, I can't wait to see what she makes with her yarn!

Also there as a small shop update:

1. Evening Sapphire, 2. Dried Roses, 3. Majestic Tempest, 4. Evening Jade, 5. Venetian Vase, 6. Sea Glass

I'm skeining yarn like a crazy person and handpainted yarn should be available in the shop within a week.

Yarn: Coming Soon!

This wonderful package came for me yesterday!! Yay cones of undyed yarn!!!

I am busy skeining these up right now before Rach and I go away to Sirius Rising for the weekend.

Soon after we've returned from our mini-vacation I'll have handpainted yarn available in my Etsy shop! 

We're unable to stay the night at Sirius due to our usual kitty-sitter being unavailable. This is kind of a good thing because it means that I'm not going to be putting my shop on vacation mode and if I get any orders over the weekend I'll still be able to get them shipped off normally.

In case anyone is curious, the yarn bases I am going to have available later next week are the following:

Llore Sock

 75% SW Wool

25% Nylon 

4-ply 

Fingering Weight

Lloot Sock

40% Bamboo

40% SW Wool

20% Nylon

4-Ply

Heavy Fingering Weight

Llabyrinth Lace

55% Silk

45% SW Wool

Laceweight

Llegend Worsted

100% SW Wool

Worsted Weight

I am very excited to be adding these product lines to my store!

In personal news, this is the roving I'm spinning right now:

It's my Lleaf Roving custom dyed for my Mom as a thank you for all her help getting me started with my business! I'm spinning it to be a 2-ply fingering weight and it will probably be knit up by her into ankle socks.

Speaking of my Mom, she has entered the blogosphere and you should check out her knitting blog: MommaTwigKnitter

Also I'm hoping to update the shop tonight with 5 new rovings!

OMG BLOG UPDATE!!! Image Heavy

First, gratuitous pictures of our trip to NC for Thanksgiving:

It was really too cold to go in the water, but that didn't stop Rach and I from going in up to our waists! Oh I LOVE the beach!!!
This is Arden's shawl all done (and in time for X-mas too!) modeled by my lovely girlfriend Rachel. And yes, that is a giant ceramic badger in the lower left corner. Rach loves badgers the way I love llamas and she made it in her Handforming Clay Studio. Leila is poking about in the bottom right there.
Here are my Mom's Monkey Socks all complete. (Thanks Mom for the picture):

These are my Dad's socks.For some reason the first one self-striped beautifully (it was not self-striping yarn) and the second one refused! I cast it on and ripped it out 6 or 7 times before my Dad said I should just knit them and get it over with. Sorry these were late Daddy!(Thanks again to my Mom for the picture):

My Mom has been inspired by the handknit socks I made them and has picked back up her knitting needles after many years away from them. She had never knit socks but I showed her how to make a baby bootie with a heel flap and gusset and she's been feverishly knitting socks for her and Dad since!!! Yay someone to enable and share fibery goodness with!! I don't know if I've mentioned this on the blog but my Mom is my best friend and I call her and talk with her every day, so it's exciting to have her as a knitting buddy too! (Like we really needed more to chatter on about!)

Speaking of Mom, she bought me some stash when we went yarn store crawling in Buffalo this January during their visit to buy my laptop (SQUEEE!! I love my new MacBook more than life itself...and it's purple!!!::licks laptop::) I've never tried Flat Feet and I was helping my Mom pick out her first sock yarn ever, so she get me this as a pressie!!!

At this point, chronologically speaking, my life blew up. With the help of my parents I decided to leave school and pursue other things. It was one of the hardest decisions I've ever had to make but my parents were beyond amazing about it!! I have mental health disorders (those who get squeamish about such things can scroll down, there are more pretty pictures to come) and I've taken time off of school before to deal with them and come back and it was just not working out. I was stagnating there, and using it as an excuse not to grow. I may go back someday, I may not, but for now I am focusing on new endeavors and it has really been good for me!

I still am going to keep the new endeavor a bit secret until I know more, but stay tuned!

I had a spinning swap in January for which I spun this lovely batt from Crystal Creek Fibers (nice transition huh?):

It turned into this yarn: (Photo compliments of my swap partner Hattie because I forgot to take any ::headesk::

 I received this lovely skein in exchange (I don't normally like glitz but this is quite subtle and nice):

I spun up another Crystal Creek Fiber batt (I adore her batts!!) for myself. This is the single, I'll probably do a 2-ply.

These are Mark's Slytherin socks that I just finished (sorry for the lateness Mark!) I'd never done two colors before and I had to wing the heel a bit. If I do another pair with accent heels I'll start further up the heel flap with the color change, do a peasant heel or do toe-up.

This is what I'm spinning right now. The amazing BFL I picked up at the Knox Farm Fiber Festival this fall. I'm going to handpaint it when I'm done.

I still need to make Rach's holiday socks (it's a good thing she loves me), but I need to order size  1 1/2 needles from Knit Picks.

I also need to make my sister's 80's Glam Rock Legwarmers (she asked for them, what can I say, we were children of the 80's) and a BSJ for a friend of the family who is due in April (yikes!). I don't have the yarn (or the money for the yarn) right now so I'm kinda stuck on those.

I'm making the Putting on the Ritz Legwarmers from Knit Picks (these are actually cool legwarmers, not the cheezy 80's kind) for myself and I am done with one. I still need to seam it and I need buttons.

Whew, so much to update on. Hopefully my blog posts will become more frequent again and I promise I'll let you in on my secret soon!!

Knox Farm Fiber Festival

As I mentioned in an earlier post I visited the Knox Farm Fiber Festival on the 27th. My GF and one of my good friends went with me and we had a blast! They were quite patient with me as I dragged them from booth to booth and back again, visited the llamas 3 or 4 times and searched for a sheep shearing that was advertised but no one in the place knew anything about. Did I mention the LLAMAS!?!? I LOVE LLAMAS, they are my fav animal (okay, it might be more like an obsession, but I WILL own llamas some day)!!!! All in all it was a great day and I got a great fiber haul (not to mention Mighty Taco on the way home!!!!)

This is my haul on my car:

I got 6 oz. of washed llama (it has some VM but I'm hand picking it and I'm scoping out some Indigo Hound Viking combs):


And a closeup:


4 oz. of combed llama top:


8 oz. of BFL (OMG I know why it's so popular it's luscious!!!):


A 2.5 oz. Coopworth batt:


A closeup:


2 oz. of Bamboo:


2 oz. of Tencel:


1 oz. each Silk Caps (in my fav colors):


8 g Silk Hankie:


Of course I couldn't post about the fiber fest without showing some animals!!

A very sweet female llama who liked to go in circles and trip you with her lead:


A very cranky male alpaca who growled at everyone:


3 very mean sheep who kept coming up to the fence like they were going to let us pet them and then scooting off to the far end of the pen whenever we got closer than 6 inches to them (they were taunting us!!!):


A llama momma and some babies from the booth I bought my llama fiber from (squeeee!!):

My distraction, Stash Pics

Here she is, the tiny little distraction that is my excuse for not crossing the finish line for the Ravelympics. Her name is Leila and she was a VERY unexpected addition to our little family. We found her the 21st of August under my car in our driveway. She was very emaciated (this picture was taken a couple of days after we got her), flea-bitten, but soooooo lovable. We adopted her and the vet said when we found her that she was 6 months old bsed on the size of her teeth (other than the fleas she had an intestinal parasite and we still have to get her fixed next month). She's now a healthy 4 pounds and still such a love!!! Orpheus (our 2-year-old, 14 pound cat whom we found as a stray and adopted when he was 8 months old) adjusted pretty quickly to her presence and they get along just fine.

Orpheus was also starved when we found him and so has always been very obsessed with food (as starved animals have a tendecy to be), but he actually backs down and leaves his food to Leila if she's around. It's so bad we have to lock her in the bedroom to feed Orpheus and then feed her when he's done!! If we feed them at the same time she'll run between the bowls and eat from them so fast that Orpheus won't get a chance to eat anything.

Here is after a couple of days. (My cats love to lay all over the bed and get the matress pad all cat-hair as soon as I've stripped the sheets for the wash):

This was taken about a week ago...they are sooo cute (and look how much Leila has grown)!!

She is a narcoleptic gremlin cat who loves laps and naps more than anything else (well, except food). She'll lay in my arms like a baby or lay on my lap while I spin and fall asleep within 2 minutes. At night she either sleeps on my chest, between my ankles or between our pillows (I've accidentally squooshed her lots of times but she never gets discouraged). She is mischevious as all kittens are but she's a lap cat and extremely cute, so I forgive her.

On to fiber-related things:

My first plied-on-the-wheel yarn is in front here and there's another center pull ball of singles in the back:

This is the rest of the fiber that I got for the Ravelympics (It's all spun now but I haven't taken picstures of the finished yarn yet):

4 Oz. Ramboullet in the colorway "Glee" from FlawfulFibers


A sample of Shetland they sent me with the Ramboullet


4 oz. of Superwash Merino in the colorway "Amethyst" from DyeabolicalYarns

Next post: Picstures from the Knox Farm Fiber Festival, including new stash pics!!

Chautauqua County Fair, Spinning Update

Yes it that time of the year again. GF and I went to the fair today before she had to go to work. She's working all evening shifts today and I have an unheard of 3 days off this week (!!!!!), so we braved the morning t-showers (it cleared off pretty much as we got there) and spent a couple of hours wandering.

Unfortunately my favorite ride of all time was closed down while we were there (major pouting!!!!), it's one of the few fair/park rides I go on and I could ride it all day!!!

Most of our time was spent looking at all the animals.

First the "zoo" animals...
Look how cute the Ring-Tailed Lemurs were all cuddled together!!!

This Black Tufted Lemur was sooo cute in his basket too!!

Now onto the livestock barns!

We saw everything but I took pictures sparingly with my phone because the quality isn't very good.

A calf (so sweet!!):

SHEEPIES!!!! Most of the sheep they had were Suffolk, Dorsets and X's but I don't remember what these were.

I saw a few breeds I'd never heard of before: Hamp, Shropshire, Dorper and this one...Montdale (their noses are so long!):

A Border Leiscester:

They were shearing and there were bags of fleece and there were yearlings and my brain fell out of my head for all of this and forgot to take pictures!! Sadly there were no wool vendors, in fact there were hardly any vendors at all this year!!! I was tempted to talk to the shearer about getting some fleece, but since I don't have combs yet, I resisted.

Then onto the goats..look at the kids!!!

And some more goats:
One of the goats in the barn (whose breed I didn't catch but had the most lovely coloring, deep reddish brown with a black stripe down its head and back) decided that once I started scratching his head I wasn't allowed to leave!!! Of course this caught all the other goats' attention and I was stuck scratching goats for 15 minutes...well there are worse things, I do love goaties!!!

Of course there was also fair food (one of my favorite parts of the Fair). We had curly fries, fried dough and fresh squeezed lemonade!!!

In spinning news: I finally finished Navajo plying the rest of the Peacock blue Colonial singles that were thinner than the ones I'm gifting. It turned out to be 16 WPI (as opposed to the 12 WPI the other skeins had!!!) and 90 yards. I also plied about 60 more yards of my shawl Alpaca and spun about a half bobbin of the Cameo singles. I have tomorrow off too and Friday so there will probably be lots of spinning going on, including my first wheel spinning on Friday!!!!!