A Bit of Progress and A Bit of Yarn

I have slowly been working on the disappearing pinwheel quilt over the last two weeks. I have all the sashing done and have the first borders and binding cut. A few piano keys have been sewn together for the second border and I hope to have a finished top by the end of the week.

I have also spun most of the merino roving into singles and could not resist plying the first skein. It is approximately 3 ounces and 125 yards. Unfortunately, I only have 5 ounces left so will have a little over 300 yards when I am done. Not enough for the pattern I was thinking of using. I will need to do a little pattern searching on Ravelry to find an alternative.

At the end of next week, I need to start working on products for our farm business but I intend to keep plugging away at a few of my own projects to get a little more balance in my life in 2020.

A New Decade, Old UFO's and a Bad Case of Startitist

A new year, a new decade and a very neglected blog. Once again I will try to record my fiber journey on a regular basis. We will see how long this lasts.

As the winter months are a little slower on the farm and business (Pendle Alpacas), I  hope to spend more time in the studio sewing and quilting for a change. I am trying to work on UFO's instead of starting any new projects as the number of works in progress would take several pages to record.

I want to finish a charity quilt that started out as a series of blocks made when I helped do a presentation for my local guild back in October on disappearing blocks. I worked with the pinwheel block and as I wanted to show lots of variations - I ended up making twelve blocks.

I plan on sashing the blocks and then adding a piano key border to make it a nice size lap quilt. I have started cutting out the fabric for the boarder - using the fabrics from the blocks. I managed to pull all but one the different purple print fabrics out of my stash.

Of course I have a terrible case of Startitist - new projects are beckoning to me. I am limiting that to a spinning/knitting project as it is too cold and dark to work in the studio after sunset. I have had this roving for several years and I think I now know what I want to knit out of it. So I will beginning splitting it up tonight and hope to begin spinning it tomorrow.

A Little Yarn Among the Quilting

Six of the reasons I haven't had much time to quilt as much as I would like lately are these guys:

The alpacas are Micha, Rio, Smudge and Speed Bump and the two donkeys are Miss Sophie and Jasper.  We got the donkeys about two and half years ago and the alpacas have been on the farm two years and one day.  Although none of them are terrible time consuming to take care of, they do dictate a schedule to our lives as we feed and water them twice a day.  

The other part of running a fiber farm that takes up a great deal of my time is handling the alpacas fleece.  We shear in early May every year and from our four boys get about 25 pounds of fiber that is turned in to everything from dyer balls to yarn.  After sending out our first fleece to a mill to be processed, we found that it is more cost effective (and satisfying) for a small farm like ours to process it ourselves.  It has been a learning process but I think we are finally getting our routine down.

One of the most enjoyable parts of working with the fiber is spinning. Below are two yarns I spun earlier this year:

Schist - a 50/50 mix of Rio and Speed Bump

Jade - dyed Rio

This is day #4 of the 31 Day Blog Writing Challenge.  I hope to be able to get in the studio tomorrow and quilt some before our big storm arrives this weekend (they are saying we might get up to a foot of snow and I have limited heat in the studio - so I might be doing a lot of spinning and knitting in the house starting Sunday!)