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After 4.5 years of making this I'm finally finished! The Beekeeper's Quilt pattern by tinyowlknits.

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Progress on my new project!!! I’m loving the colors too

Pattern name: Double Win Mosaic Shawl on Ravelry!! My first ever mosaic project and I’m supremely enjoying it so far. The multicolored yarn will be the stockinette panel in the middle of the shawl!!! As much as I’m enjoying the mosaic I’m really looking forward to using that yarn hehehe

The colors make me think of honeybees and lilac flowers hehehe, it’s so sunny and happy!!!

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Arranging objects again. Whites and offwhites again.

I hope it's okay if I keep sharing my little arrangements. I don't have the energy to stitch at the moment, but this keeps my brain sparking along with new ideas and feeds my need to create in a small way each day. I do recognise that it may be getting a little repetitive for you though.

I like how this looks a bit like an awkward family photo or some sort of stilted still life.

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Book cases!

Well, kind of. I have the ikea Kallax shelves in my studio and they mostly let me do two layers of yarn deep.

I have three in my room, all stuffed full and with more (mostly equipment) on top.

I will admit this is not nearly enough room, and this is not a flaw on the kallax's part, but my tendency to accumulate fiber and yarn at an alarming rate, far outstripping the rate at which i use it.

My unprocessed wool in in the closet, primarily in paper bags, currently waiting to be washed and prepped before joining the stash. My roving and bats have half a bookcase to themself, and having the divided cubes makes it pretty easy to squash more fiber in together without having to resort to ziplock or vacuum bags.

I really found that having the vertical dividers on the shelf let the fiber be more stable when stacked vertically, and that usually lets me see more at once, which really increases my likelihood of using

I have each of the cubes sorted by fiber types, and when they take up more than one cube, they get broken down by color or use (novelty yarn has its own cube, for example).

Once I get home, I'll see about adding some pictures of the actual space.

What is your fleece/fiber/fluff storage situation? They take up so much space bc of all the air in the fluff and just filling a tub makes it hard to find any specific fluff so.

How are we storing the stash of fluff?

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Hello fellow gays with weird niche hobbies, please enjoy my rainbow handspun wip

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Playing with a new toy today. Fiber is Versailles by cashmereandcoconuts on etsy. Spinning wheel is a Starling by Daedalus Spinning Wheels.

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Books are like yarn in that if you buy them from a small local shop then you're actually performing a civic duty and you can buy as much as you want without feeling guilty. So actually my towering TBR pile and stash of untouched yarn is kind of heroic if you think about it,

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Isabelle D’s Lush Crocheted Landscapes Intertwine Pain and Pleasure

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I have to draw a lot of gold and metal for my work, but wasn't happy with any of the metal tutorials i could find around. I prefer really specific instruction, so after some research i put together what i think works as a generalist's guide/tutorial. Not perfectly accurate, but i hope it's helpful!

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SPINNING TIME 🥳🥳🥳

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Oscar de la Renta: 'Crafted like a mosaic, discover the making-of the #odlrfall2024 stained glass gown — ushering in a a new House-signature embroidery technique.'

Constructed from hundreds of polyamide panes, hand-sewn together in an Art Nouveau style reminiscent of Tiffany glass. Ready-to-wear: £36,546.

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i wanna learn to spin so bad, why are all the wheels $300+ 😔

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i really like seeing posts about how other people are processing their fibre, so i thought that i'd add ours. we bought a couple bags (about three kilos—this photo is only half) of raw fleece at sheep and wool, and now have it all washed out and cleaned up.

the most helpful boys in the world were very interested in what we were doing, and frankly far less suspicious of the large tub of water than i would've preferred for them to be.

anyhow, about a kilo of fleece got dumped into the tub and arranged to be as aligned as possible. in future washes, i didn't bother with this and didn't find that there was much a difference, and certainly not sufficient difference to justify the time and effort spent carefully laying it out.

i imagine that this is different if you're washing a whole fleece and things are already more or less aligned. if you're washing a bag of of fleece that's just been plopped into the bag, i would suggest not bothering.

the small bag at the end were some locks that we'd picked ahead of time to see if they washed up nicer. (spoiler: they did not.)

worth noting is that we have one of those bathtubs that's short but deep, so this isn't as much water or space as it looks like.

if you've ever wanted to see how water-resistant wool is, here's a great example. these photos were taken the next morning, and some of the fibre was still totally dry, despite having carefully pushed it all underwater before we headed to bed.

after about twelve hours of soaking, this is what we had—the water doesn't look that dirty in the second photo, but you can just barely see a cloud of dirt at the edge of the mesh bag we were using to hold the wool in place in the tub. (it was just laid on the bottom of the tub, and meant that we could easily move the wool up or down the tub, or lift it out entirely, without having to move it much.)

anyhow, soaking water from this batch went into a bucket to feed my wife's plants. (and then the next batch i fucked up and drained it. 🤡 it's amazing they put up with me, tbh.)

wool got moved safely away from the water, and then it was time for the hottest tap water we could manage. our tap runs at well over 60c/145f, so we didn't bother to try to make it any warmer. as it was, i was very grateful that we'd bought the extra heavy duty kitchen gloves.

we added a couple splurts of dishsoap (palmolive) to the tub, then carefully let the fleece spread itself out again, which doesn't take much encouragement, thankfully. and then we fucked off for a while.

twenty minutes later, the water looked like this.

my hand's in the water to about my knuckles in that photo, and as you may notice, it very much appears that i have no fingers.

second wash. our friend the very large mesh laundry bag helped hold the fleece first away from the drain, and then from the tap, and we did it again just like the first wash.

another twenty minutes, and we had this.

you can almost believe that i've got fingers! progress!

this post offers a great look at what it looks like when lanolin is leaving a fleece. we have incredibly soft water, so most of their findings weren't especially relevant to our washing, but the visual guide is fantastic, especially since it took them so many changes to get things clean.

so again, drained, refilled, and resoaped, then left to sit for twenty minutes. and this time, i came back to this!

a whole entire hand! fingertips and everything! i was sort of surprised, honestly, since fine wools have a reputation for being really lanolin heavy, but after this batch of fleece i went down to two washes, and feel like it was more than sufficient for 90% of it. (there was a chunk of merino/bond cross in a later batch that was a little shorter and more lanolin heavy, and likely could've used a third wash, but i'm using that to make rolags and it's going fine, so whatever.)

anyhow, fleece clean! rinse time!

this looks like fleece in water, because that's what it is. we did two rinses, and that seemed plenty sufficient to get out all the suds.

next we spread it out as gently as possible onto a cheap sweater drying rack and hung it on a giant screw that's sort of inexplicably sticking sharp-end-out of the eaves of our porch. (and you'd be like 'that sounds normal, lots of people have screws or whatever to hang things,' to which i'd say 'it does! except that there are three of them and the placement is utterly bizarre, and this is the only one that you can hang anything from.' my best guess is christmas lights, but why a screw? why sharp side out? how sharp side out, at that?)

wool, drying! and the hated roses that have been blooming all fucking winter and are continuing to bloom and are getting bigger and now have spawned more roses somehow, and now we have a bunch of red roses, too. when we moved into this place a year and a half ago there were only white roses. we don't know where the red ones came from, nor do we know why the roses are suddenly VERY TALL—see how in this photo, they don't even clear the top of the wall? now they're like 50cm over it. eighteen inches over it. why. i hate them.

i will continue to hate them unless they become tall enough and self-support enough that they accidentally shade our office, in which case i will hate them slightly less but i'll be mad about it.

and now we're done! that's a lock of nice clean wool! all we did before this photo was fluff out the tips a bit.

i combed some out, and it's pretty good!

nice little nests of combed top. the wool's slightly different colours because, like i said, it wasn't a fleece, it was just fleece, if that makes sense, so there's a bit of a range of colouration in there. but there's much less loss than i'd expected, even combing it out, and all up this was a much easier and less miserable process than i'd feared it would be!

i've put off buying raw fleece for a long time, partly because i've mostly lived in apartments and haven't had a ton of space in which to wash it, and partly because i'm disabled and was afraid that doing it would be too much physically, but it turns out that i probably could have done this a lot sooner, and also that it's not really that hard on the body. the worst of it for me was bending over the tub to fill/refill and then get the wool onto the drying screen, which was a little rough, but definitely not so rough i wouldn't do it again.

(we then did this several more times to get all the fleece washed, and i can already tell you: we're gonna do it again.)

this is the first time i've done raw fleece that had lanolin in it, so please don't take this as an authoritative resource, but that's what we did, and it worked really well and was a lot easier than i'd feared, so i figured i'd share.

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If you have achieved something, please remember to observe a mandatory period of basking in the warm glow of your achievement like a lizard on a stone, lest you teach your brain that effort is futile, actually, because it didn't get to enjoy its happy chemicals, so, naturally, nothing good ever comes of trying. (And no, avoiding punishment is not a reward!)

I recommend, like, 5% of basking time in relation to whatever time you invested into achieving the thing minimum. And if you can't make your own bask, friend-brought is fine (= tell your friends!).

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no definite plans (but definitely some ephemeral ideas depending on what we get out of this)...Southdown from the UNR flock.

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If you knit at all, I am begging you to learn how to read your stitches, it will make your life so much easier, I promise.