What happens when you cross hamsters and jellybeans?

Hamsterbeans!

If I do another one, I'm going to get safety eyes or beads or some other way to give it shiny black eyes. Unless I make it as a cat toy, that is. (Horrors!) He's a quick knit, but very cute in person.

And I was on a roll today, so I finally got this little guy's eyes sewn on:

The sad part is that it took longer to put everything away than it did to sew on the eyes, but I'd put it off anyway. (Most googly eyes are glue-on, but I don't like using glue on fiber crafts. It's usually messy, the hold is often short-lived, and if I'm going to spend so much time on something, I prefer to use archival supplies. Even if it's a purple-and-pink octopus. :) )

Because I have so many hobbies and can go so long between putting one down and picking it up again, someone once asked me if I forget how to do them in the meantime. No, not usually, because most of them are muscle memory. For example, long before I was an avid knitter, I was an avid crocheter. I don't think I've picked up a hook (except maybe to rescue a dropped knit stitch) in 10 years before today, but lookit me go! Doin' tricks and everything.

The stripes are independently spiraled. The two colors never join horizontally anywhere; they only run on top of each other. (You can do this in circular knitting, too.) I also learned the magic ring start.

I have a metric buttload of pearl cotton that I got for crazy quilting, only to find I hate embroidering with it. It's just too thick; it's hard to pull through multiple layers of fabric. Now I want the box it's stored in for other stuff, so I was looking for a way to use it up and found a hacky sac footbag pattern I liked. I'm probably going to go up a hook size for the next one. This one came out kind of small and light. Mara (one of the cats) is playing with it right now, which probably wasn't such a good idea on my part. Mara's fine, but if Angel gets hold of it she'll chew it open and get plastic pellets everywhere, plus now they're going to be stealing it off my desk. Maybe I should take it to work as a stress ball.

Anyone else play Hacky Sac when you were a kid? I was never good at it per se, but I could do well enough that the guys would let me join in. I could usually successfully get it to someone else in the circle, even if I couldn't do tricks very well.

I don't think I ever showed this off

It's my wonderfully geeky Spiderman blanket! I finished it like a year ago, and even took the photo then, but just never got around to posting it. So w00t! There it is!

I shouldn't have done that.

I finished spinning the purple/pink silk I was working with. Yum, chock full of fibery goodness:

Of course, I'm planning to two-ply that, so I needed to get half of it onto another bobbin. Unfortunately, I don't have a bobbin winder, because I just haven't been able to bring myself to spend that much. I do have an eggbeater drill, but would you believe I do not have a single dowel rod that would correctly fit into either my cardboard storage or my old non-WooLee Winder wheel bobbins? All the dowels in this house, and yet not one is the right size.

So, I figured I have enough WW bobbins, I can use the WooLee Winder. I set up the wheel for Irish tension (brake band on the flyer), braked the flyer nice and hard so it wouldn't move (and thus wouldn't add or remove twist), put the drive band on the bobbin and started treadling.

This was a mistake, because no other method will ever be acceptable again. A bobbin winder with a travel screw! Why hasn't someone made this? It has to be what industry uses, or something similar. I want one! And if I can't have one, continuing to use the WooLee winder in this manner is extremely tempting. (However, since I only have 4 WW bobbins, I think I will at least go get a dowel that will fit into the cardboard bobbins, for storage purposes.)

Here's the divided singles, on the Kate and ready for plying:

I love the background in that pic because it's the most delightfully geeky thing.

Finally, I promised pictures of the Ishbel scarf. Here it is on the blocking wires:

I wasn't super fastidious when laying it because it's meant to be a functional winter scarf. It'll get crumpled almost immediately.

Made it with three feet to spare!

And as you can imagine, that had me pretty nervous as I was binding off the Ishbel scarf. Normally I'd do an Estonian bind-off on an item like this, but there was no way I would have had enough yarn for that. The bind-off the pattern called for came out a little tight, but I think it'll be OK once it's all blocked out. Alpaca grows.

I hope to get it washed and blocked tomorrow or Monday, so pictures then!

Whadaya wanna bet?

I've got three rows and the bind-off left on my Ishbel shawl, but I'm also swiftly approaching the end of my ball of yarn. What do you wanna bet I run out in the middle of the bind-off? :P

Need googly eyes

For this little guy:

I actually have googly eyes for him; I just haven't gotten around to sewing them on yet. Hopefully this wonderful glorious long weekend coming up.

This is one of Hansi Singh's designs. It's included in Amigurumi Knits, as well as available individually on Ravelry. Hansi's stand-alone patterns are really awesome; she goes into so much detail. You will never find professionally published patterns as good as Hansi's self-published ones. Professional publishers just won't dedicate that much space for that much detail on one pattern.

And I'm on the last section of my Ishbel scarf. (No pictures. Unblocked lace looks like ass.) It's going very quickly, so maybe I'll get it done before the cold weather is over, and can actually use it this year. It looks like I might end up with two full hanks of Cascade Alpaca Lace left over, too. It's only taken one (doubled) so far and I'm not done with that hank yet.

Quote of the Day:

"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live." ~Oscar Wilde

I might also add "demanding others provide you with the life you wish to live" to the "selfishness" definition, after some of my life experiences.