Bringing a little bit of Canada to Hawaii - Wanderlust Projects

Just continuing on in sharing the garland projects I crocheted up for my camp site at Wanderlust O'ahu. If you'd like to see the other projects they are the:

Half Lotus Bunting
Doily Bunting

Again, this project was a great stash buster for me, all the yarn used was acrylic that I already had. The pattern is the Maple Leaf Banner designed by Susan Badgley for Red Heart. Rather than make only 7 leafs all in red, I tried to capture the fall colours of my childhood in Northern Ontario and did 5 red, 4 orange, 3 yellow, 2 dark red and 1 green, and hung them all in random order.

I loved the look of this finished garland, and can't wait to whip of some more of these leaves (I have a great idea for them), however I struggled super hard with the pattern at first. Completely my own fault (tuns out its important to read the pattern notes before jumping right in to row one). Thankfully there is a YouTube tutorial for the pattern.

 I swear you can teach yourself just about anything on YouTube.

Hand Painted recycled yarn.

Available on Etsy.

This weekend I hand painted my very first yarn.

The yarn was recycled from a thrift store sweater.

The fiber content is 42% wool, 25% viscose, 21% nylon, 8% angora and 4% cashemere, and the yarn is a DK.

I pre-soaked the skeins in room temperature water with a bit of white vinegar in it.

And prepared my Wilton's food colouring dyes. (I love the way the purple started breaking right on the paper towel!

I lay out my skeins on some plastic wrap.

And started painting. I way underestimated how much dye I'd need for so much yarn, and mixed up some more.

Look at those beautiful colours! The pink broke out of the purple.

Next, rolled the whole thing up and popped it into the microwave.

Once it had cooled it was into the bath tube to wash, and hang to dry.

The colors turned out beautifully.

Especially with Easter on it's way.

One skein will be listed on Etsy to sell, a whopping 450 yards, great for a project like a shall.

Another 450 yards I wrapped up for my self. The mini skein...well I'll be saving that for something special.

Half Lotus Bunting - Wanderlust projects

I recently attended the Wanderlust Yoga Festival in O'ahu, Hawaii. And while I was there I camped in a tent on the beach (a beautiful experience you can read about in full here). What does this have to do with yarn? Well, Wanderlust invited us to decorate our campsites with prayer flags, and while I do have a beautiful strand of traditional Tibetan flags, I opted to leave them at home and make some of my own.

So in this first Wanderlust Projects Post, I'll be sharing with you my Half Lotus Bunting, designed by Annie Soutter, and available as a free Ravelry download.

This project practically called out to me, considering the place the lotus takes in the world of yoga, and overall, the shape of this pattern really does call to mind Hindu motifs.

So I grabbed some gold yarn from my stash (bunting projects are great for de-stashing by the way) and started hooking.

Within a few minutes I knew something was going drastically wrong. Unfortunately I just didn't seem to be up to the task of following the pattern correctly. Which was likely due to the fact that I was crocheting at the myograph in the lab, while running an experiment. Any ways, I ripped it out and referred to Ravelry for help.

And this is the great, amazing thing about Ravelry... chances are someone else has run into the same problem as you, and because this community is just so amazing, chances are someone has found a solution to said problem and shared it.

Which lead me to AcorntoOak and her blog and thank goodness, a chart! I won't share the chart here, because you should definitely check out her blog and get it direct from the source. But I will share the results of it, a half lotus she made from crochet thread, which looks tiny and perfect, and I might have to make one of my own ASAP (is it just me or does it call to mind a book mark?).

Any ways, thank you so very much AcorntoOak for providing the chart (in beautiful technicolor too!) because I don't know if I would have been able to make my lotuses without you!

Yarn in Hawaii

I just got home from a solo trip to Hawaii... to enjoy some sunshine, hiking and personal time and a yoga festival. And of course, being an addict like myself, some yarn.

So I have to admit, I did a fair amount of beach knitting. Working on my Painted Desert Lace Shawl. In fact it's my very first shall and the colours of this yarn, in the candle light colourway, are just beautiful. I can't wait to decide what to do with the other two skeins of it I bought.

I also checked out the two local yarn shops on the island, Yarn Story in Honolulu, and Aloha Yarn in Kaneohe. Of course I bought some souvenir yarn at both shops, which I'll show off in a separate post. But one of the things I bought was 50 grams of Schoppel Wolle, 100% merino, pencil roving in the parrot colourway.

Which I promptly got to spinning, in my tent, on my new handmade spindle, while watching the waves crash on the beach in front of me.

And it turned out beautiful, I can't wait to finish it, and knit with it. I don't have much, so I'm thinking it would look great in little stained glass windows outlined in black. So inspiring!

And speaking of inspiring, I saw this beautiful giant dream catcher at one of the vendor tents at Wanderlust, and I simply must make one for myself!

I didn't just create while I was away, I also recycled. I found this blue cotton sweater marked down to just a couple dollars at the Forever 21 in Waikiki, and decided to unravel it. I've got a project involving over dying some of the yarn in mind for it.

I of course always bring books with me on vacation, this time I ventured into the world of knitting novels, and read My life in Stiches by Rachael Herron,  and All Wound Up by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee. I picked up both books in the mark down section at Chapters just before I left. Something about Stephanie...AKA the Yarn Harlot....it's so inspiring to see a fellow Canadian making her life as a Knitting-Writer!

Overall the trip was amazing, and I swear I didn't have my knitting in my hands all the time.

Easy as 1, 2, 3 Hat.

Last night I was in Michaels to pick up some safety eyes for the crocheted Rocket (from Guardians of the Galaxy) that I'm working on. Turns out they no longer carry them. What they do, however, carry, is wool. And lots of it.

A skein of Lion Brand Wool Ease Thick&Quick, in Toucan, caught my eye, and I had to have it. (I know I am a yarn addict, but it's in my blood, I swear!) I rushed it home and worked up this Easy as 1, 2, 3 Hat.

Well since I am calling my blog and my shop Yarn Lab, I figured I'd photograph my hat in the lab. Turns out my dissecting scope makes a perfect hat model.

The finished hat is super warm and cozy. Perfect for the kind of day when you want to stay curled up in bed all day but can't.

The pattern for this hat is available as a free download  on Ravelry.

What does the fox say?

Taking a moment to share some more of my Christmas knitting. Today it's the gifts for my cousin's little girl Penelope.

This is the Child's Foxy Tunic by Heather Lodinsky, a free pattern available via Red Heart.

And doesn't Penelope look adorable! She's a year and a half old, I knit the pattern in the size for 2 year olds, and left the shoulder seam open until she tried it on so we could make sure it fit perfect.

This is the knitting project which I am most proud of to date. Not only did it turn out perfect, but it required a lot more work than usual. Why? because I decided to knit it in Red Heart Super Saver, a worsted weight yarn, rather than the recommended Anne Geddes Baby, a DK weight yarn. Which means that I had to swatch and adjust stitch and row counts throughout. You can see some of my notes in the two images below.

In addition to all that work, I learned a hard lesson about assuming that even two worsted weight sized yarns are the same, when switching to the white for the face I thought I'd use up some stash yarn rather than go buy a new skein. The result? a horrible nose nipple that meant I had to rip up all the colour work and restart the face.

Ooof look at that, the white yarn turned out to be a lot larger than the orange.

At the end of the day, I couldn't be happier with how this project turned out, and I know Krista and Penelope were happy too. 

I plan to eventually knit this pattern a second time, and provide my notes so that anyone who wanted to knit it in the much less expensive Red Heart Super Saver could have a go at it without all the extra work.

The Warmest Tim Hortons in Canada

If you haven't seen this commercial for Tims yet, you should watch it now.

As part of their #warmwishes campaign, Tim Hortons yarn bombed the town of Fort Frances in Northern Ontario on December 17th, 2014, topping it all off by wrapping an entire Tims in woolly goodness. You can watch a time-lapse of the process in the video below.

Some of my favourite pieces of yarn bombing from the video are the bench and the fire hydrant.

I can't wait to do some yarn bombing of my own here in Calgary this year.

But the thing I loved the most in the whole video absolutely had to be the cozy looking knit covered couches and cushions. I absolutely must do a project like this in my own home one day. (even if it would take a tonne of knitting).

So thank you Tims, for warming up Fort Frances a little, warming up my own winter and for the great inspiration.