February 2023

Happy Valentine’s Day! Spread the love.  Give a flower, a card, a hand crafted items, a hug, yummy edible treats, or even just a smile.  Come see us on Valentine’s Day and you’ll be sure to get a least one of the above.  Actually, come any day and you get at least a smile.  Hugs offered freely as well as a helping hand or a pat on the back.

The Fiber House is open til 7pm on Wednesdays.   Come on it and hang out, get help, or schedule a one-on-one class. 

Event Round Up

Fair Isle KAL. Learn Fair Isle (stranded knitting) using two colors in a simple hat pattern.  Classes continue through March.  If you are adventurous, we will then continue with a top-down seamless yoke sweater with a fair isle design.  You can also choose to do a top-down sweater without doing the fair-isle design.  We’ll be using the CocoKnits Sweater Workshop for the sweater classes.

Beginning Weaving on a Rigid Heddle Loom.  2^nd half of the class is Feb 5.  Take the class for this first time or repeat the class as a refresher.

6^th Annual Cowboy Yarn Crawl – seven shops and a whole state to visit! Memorial Day to Labor Day.  Start planning your road trips now!

Feb and Mar Classes – 

Special Class – Beginning Rigid Heddle Weaving –Feb 5, 9am – 4pm.

Weekly Classes:

Wednesdays 1 to 4pm and Saturdays 10 to Noon – Learn to Knit/ Crochet.

Thursdays, 1-3pm - The Hub Group 

Saturdays, Feb 18 and Mar 18, Friday, Feb 10 and Mar 10, 1-4pm – Fair Isle Hat/ Sweater

Saturday Feb 11 and Mar 4 and 25, Friday Feb 24 and Mar 17, 1-4pm – Beginner Top-Down Socks

Friday, Feb 17 and Mar 24, Saturday, Feb 4 and 25 and Mar 11– Crocheted Baby Afghan

Fridays, Feb 3 and Mar 3, 1-4pm – Mini How To: Making repairs and fixing mistakes

February Special-

10% off All Luxury Yarns

Think linen, angora, silk, yak, sumptuous cashmere – all of these luxury yarns are on sale this month.  We have a few linen yarns available, such as Auraucania’s Ollagua, (100% linen), Jody Long’s Coastline or Juniper Moon Farms Zooey (both cotton/linen blends).  Cashmere is on of the softest yarns and we have several blends with this fiber including Universal’sBella Cash, Lang Yarns’ Grace (a soft cloud blended with silk), Amano’s Mayu Lace, and MadelineTosh’s Pashmina.  You’ll find Yak in Lang Yarns’ Setayak and Regia’s Merino Yak (a sock yarn).  Silk is a more common yarn and is found in many blends throughout the store.  A few include Silk and Merino, Juniper Moon Farms’ Moonshine and Moonshine Fine, Plymouth Yarn’s Mushishi, and all the Noro Silk Garden yarns.

NEW! NEW! NEW!

As crafters, we all like new tools and gadgets.  And this month we have a selection of cool things from CocoKnits.  We can never have too many project bags so we have a couple different sizes of rustic linen bags – a bigger one perfect for sweater projects and a smaller one that works great for sock and hat projects.  For sweater or hand-crafted project care we have two sizes of washing bags, superabsorbent towels, and a pop-up dryer.  The pop-up dryer allows you to lay out the sweater on top of it and have air flow to both sides for faster drying.

Speaking of sweaters, we also have CocoKnits Sweater Workshop and Sweater Workshop Journal.  The workshop teaches how to knit a top-sown, seamless sweater tailored to your measurements.  The journal allows you to list out your increase and decreases line by line for any sweater you knit and keeps track of details for each project.  We’re planning to use this workshop in our top-down fair-isle sweater class.

And summer is coming so of course we have to stock up on the new summer yarns.  We just received Hikoo’s Alpico, a sport to dk weight cotton/ alpaca blend.  This is a lovely thick and thin, variegated and heathered yarn.  Think summer tops and lightweight shawls.  There’s even a sample on the table for you to try out!

From Berroco we have their new Vintage Baby and Vintage Baby Handpaint.  These two dk weight yarns are new to the Vintage family of acrylic/wool blends and are just as lovely to work with as the worsted and chunky versions we have in stock.  Also from Berroco is the new Lumi, a dk weight cotton/polyester yarn with a soft metallic strand to glam it up, and Splash, a dk weight viscose/cotton that features long dashes of color on a neutral background.  We have pattern books available for these yarns but they will also be perfect for a top down summer tee using the Sweater Workshop to design your own.

Don’t forget to check each month for the new hand dyed yarn of the month from Wicked Tint. 

Weaving and Spinning News

Reminder:  we will be moving our meeting to the 3^rd Sunday of the month to accommodate other scheduled events and we are also changing the meeting time to 1:00.  We will be meeting at the UU Fellowship building, Sunday Feb 19, 2023 from 1 to 4pm.  Bring a snack to share.  

In Consideration of . . . (also known as – Donna’s Soapbox):

Writing About What Other People Are Writing About

Trolling the internet can be a huge time suck.  You would have gotten this newsletter a lot quicker if I hadn’t fallen down one of those “pesky wabbit” holes!  Anyway, I was curious about knitting blogs and that’s what I spent several hours doing.  It can be interesting but then I don’t get my stuff done!  So here’s some interesting tidbits I found in the “wabbit warren.”

Ravelry had a posting summarizing Ravelers activities for 2022.  You can check this out at www.ravelry.com.  They note that there are about 1.2 million patterns now available on Ravelry and that last year alone there were 1.3 million projects completed and posted to Ravelry.  Since I haven’t added any of my completed project for several years, and I’m sure there are many other crafters that don’t post either, can you just imagine how many knitting, crocheting, and weaving projects must have been completed world wide for the year?  I’d like to think that there were probably just as many finished projects as there are people in the world which would be about 8 billion (as of Nov 15, 2022 - worldometers.info).  Okay maybe that’s stretching it a bit but it’s cool to think that there might be at least one yarn crafted item per person. 😊

That same post on Ravelry had another really interesting item.  It’s a list of the countries with the highest number of completed projects (as posted on Ravelry obviously) per 100,000 population.  At the top of the list is Iceland with 678 projects per 100,000 people. Iceland has been at the top of the list every year that Ravelry has collected the data.  The other “cool” thing (out definitely intended) is the other five on the list: Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden, and Denmark.  If you noticed (I’m sure you did!) all of these countries are in the northern latitudes (i.e. they’re cold!).  Shouldn’t really surprise anyone that they make a lot of hand-crafted stuff since I’m sure they spend plenty of time indoors!

Continuing my wandering (and wondering) way, I googled knitting blogs and got a hit listing the top 14 knitting blogs for 2023. (https://zenyarngarden.com/blogs/zen-news/top-7-best-knitting-blogs-for-2020).  Yeah, I know, someone else writing about what other people are writing about.  Writers in general are all a little weird.  Well the top of the list was Ravelry – lol.  So then I had to check out the blog in the number two spot: Nimble Needles (https://nimble-needles.com/).

This is actually a great website and I spent quite a bit of time there rather than doing my own writing.  Norman, the guy who created the website, has blogs, knitting tutorials, patterns, and a bunch of other stuff. It’s worth a few minutes (possibly even hours) to check out his tutorials and blogs.  One of his blogs I read through gave me a chuckle though.  He wrote about the 25 essential tools for knitters.  The top three items: Needles, Yarn, and Scissors - well, duh!!

Next month – online videos (i.e. you tube)!