A productive day - and a Christmas tree!

After a lovely Thanksgiving on Thursday, yesterday I spent the day relaxing and working on some projects that I've been meaning to finish for a while now.  First I mended two sweaters that have been sitting in my drawer with holes since last winter, including this one that had a hole in the right elbow.  It's a delightfully warm and lightweight cashmere hoodie, so to fix the hole I needle felted a little heart over it.  Robert says he's never going to stop teasing me about "wearing my heart on my sleeve."

 I also finished the second of these two project bags.  They have a large buttoned pocket for yarn and a small sleeve for a pencil sewn into the lining.  I think they're the perfect size for sock projects.  One of them is headed for New York, where a new friend my mom and I met at yarn school last month lives.  She gave me some really lovely sock yarn, and I wanted to make her something to say thank you.  I hope she likes it!

Then this morning, Robert and I went out and bought a Christmas tree.  Then we went and got a simple felt tree skirt, six strings of white lights, a bunch of little red ball ornaments, and a lit-up star tree topper.  We also put on several gold and silver Rosendahl "Karen Blixen's Jul" ornaments that I already had.  Robert carved a little wooden tree ornament, and has plans to carve some more!

Felted soap

Even though there are no colloquia in the summer, and I'm focusing on math right now (like, a lot), I'm still working on some projects - and thinking about others.  I realized that I won't be able to make a new dress or skirt before the end of June at the earliest (so if I do make one this summer I won't finish in time to wear it this summer) and that made me kind of sad.  But last week I made this quick and easy project.  I started with a lavender Dr. Bronner's bar of soap, wrapped it with colored wool, and felted it in a bowl of hot tap water.  I put it in my locker at the gym, so now I don't have to use the gross-smelling soap they have in the showers in the locker room anymore.  That makes me happy.  The felt is sort of like a built-in washcloth, and it keeps the wet soap from making a mess in my locker. 

Chicken and pigeons

Robert and I have been in our new apartment just over a month now, and for the past two or three weeks, we've had a pair of pigeons attempting to nest in our juliette balcony. I say "attempting" because these two pigeons are extraordinarily bad parents. They built a nest, and the female laid two eggs (much to our dismay). Then all of the nesting material fell through the grate and/or off the side. Then one of the eggs apparently fell over the side. Then, last week, Robert noticed that the remaining egg is broken. But none of these misfortunes have prevented the pigeons from sitting on the egg, and the male(? - I'm not 100% sure which is which) pigeon keeps on trying to bring twigs to reconstitute the nest. This has been totally unsuccessful, because he's just a little too fat to comfortably fit between the bars of the balcony. He flies up with a twig in his beak, tries to come through the bars, flaps his wings a few times, drops the twig to the ground, and flies off for another one. Every time. It would be very amusing, except that the pigeons are kind of noisy and gross and generally annoying.

In other birdie news, my needle-felted chicken from a previous post is finally framed and hanging up in our kitchen:

Yellow Rose Fiber Producers Fiesta!

A few weeks ago (okay, the second week of April) my Mom and I met up to go to the Yellow Rose Fiber Producers Fiesta in Seguin, TX. We had an absolutely wonderful time, except for when my gluten-free mom and my vegan self were walking around tiny, economically distressed downtown Seguin looking for lunch on Saturday and they didn't have ANY FOOD. None at all.

We took a few classes: a short morning intro to needle felting and a longer afternoon introduction to rigid heddle weaving.

You can see the finished product of my needle-felted chicken at the top of this post. I think it's absolutely adorable, and my plan is to crop it, frame it, and hang it in my new kitchen when we move (next week!). We took a copy of a page from a coloring book and traced it onto the clear water-soluble "fabric" you can see in this picture:

Then we took a bit of fluffy fiber and poke-poke-poke it into the fabric, with a foam block behind it.

The second class was rigid heddle weaving. I made a small table-runner-ish item:

Here's the almost-finished product. I still need to tie off the ends for fringe.

Here's a close-up so you can see the lovely self-striping color of this bamboo yarn:

And finally, I only made one purchase at the show, but it was a good one. It seemed like most of the exhibitors were alpaca farmers from Texas. So of course I had to buy some alpaca fiber. I got this custom-made batt from a booth where they had a bunch of fiber in different solid colors on display. I got to choose my colors (which were purple, white, and a bit of blue-green silk) and the man ran it through his carding machine to blend it all together in a beautiful way. Here it is: