Portland sale and project, and yarrrrn!

Portlanders!  Now that Halloween is over, we’re into that season, and this Saturday is the Trillium Artisans Holiday Sale!!  Sale not as in craft fair type sale, but as in everything is 20% off all day sale!  That’s a big deal since everything at Trillium is handmade by local artists/crafters, using at least half (usually much more) recycled materials, with great attention to quality and awesomeness!!  I sell my recycled yarn knit kits and recycled sweater scarflets through Trillium, and I plan to drop off some brand new items before the sale!

Also, it’s their 10 year anniversary, which rocks; and also, you get to meet the artists and drink wine and eat snacky goodies!  And one last also, when Trillium says “eco-friendly, fair trade gifts” they seriously mean it!  Hope to see you there!!

A note for non-Portlanders or anyone who can’t make it to the store – Trillium has a great etsy shop too!  You can find a couple of my mitt kits there, and tons of other fabulous stuff!

Next up (also for locals)… it’s the last week of free Knittn’ Kitten project sheets!  This one is by Bridget Benton and makes fabulous use of the doilies you can find at the Kitten!

Bridget says:

This project sheet was inspired by a scarf pattern I saw in Generation T: Beyond Fashion by Megan Nicolay and by all the awesome crochet-adorned garments in, yes, Crochet Adorned by Linda Permann. I can’t crochet, but I can sure as heck buy crocheted doilies from the Knittn’ Kitten, and experiment with 100 ways to get them off the couch and onto my clothes . . . I heartily encourage you to do the same!

There’s also this bonus t-shirt project – love it!!

Soooo, now that all the projects have been released at the Kitten, you can be expecting a free (to everyone) ebook with all of them coming soon!!  Wooo yay!  (Give your thanks to Diane for putting it together!!)

Hey look I spun yarn a couple weeks ago!  Haven’t really been spinning at all since Tour de Fleece (except spun recycled for the club, and that dirty alpaca), so it was fun to make this skein!  It’s destined to be knit into an Elizabeth Zimmermann snail hat, for Cosy’s snail hat along, but super belated (oops, better late than never)!  Those were both ravelry links – see Cosy’s blog post about handspun snail hats here.  So, it took me 4 1/2 months to spin the yarn for the project, so I’m guessing the hat won’t get done till ’10 at least, but it’ll be super fun to make a project just for me, just for fun!

Oh yeah, the yarn!  It’s spun with Spunky Eclectic bamboo/merino blend in the Sumac colorway, and a batt from the Traveling Rhinos fiber club.  Spun so that the colors matched up a little when plied (for blendy stripes), beginning and ending with the yellow/brown bamboo blend, with the many colors of assorted wooly goodness in the middle.  I named it Famous Yellow Belly after a Tara Jane O’Neil song.  Hoping it knits up beautifully!

Oh yeah, this yarn talk just reminded me that I added some new colorways to my cuff kit selection! I really love this crazy one, that I named Razzle Dazzle Rose (after a Camera Obscura song), and struggled to resist keeping it all for myself! Same yarn, different angle:

Then there’s Ocean Breathes Salty (named after a Modest Mouse song, but really named for the Sun Kil Moon cover of the song, which feels like the yarn):

And Promises In the Dark (Pat Benatar song) is a dark charcoal over-dyed with subtle green and blue:

Yay yarn! Really hoping to get some new mitt kits in the shop soon too! Right now though, I’m hard at work on a secret project (which involves hand-dyed yarn)! I was hoping to release it this week, but it needs more work to get perfect, and with the November club shipping on Monday, it probably won’t be announced till late next week. But it’ll be super duper cool and worth the wait, really!