Felt and Silk

A couple of days ago, there was a craft fair with a difference in town.  IconoCraft aimed to give attendees the chance not just to buy beautiful handcrafts, but to try their hand at some of the crafts represented!  I’ve long wanted to try my hand at needle felting, so I signed up at the table run by Tally from I Could Make That.  I’ll admit, I had to mentally remind myself several times, “it’s not a competition!”  There were so many amazingly cute critters springing up off the foam blocks!  But Nimble Mymble, as I’m calling her for her resemblance to the character from Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll books, turned out delightfully!  I am thinking she will join Cinderella, bunny, and deer in Rada’s toybox, but first she came out for a mini photo-shoot with Posy!  Pics and the rest of the post under the cut.

I’m inordinately proud of the fact that I have kept this mini rosebush alive for almost two weeks now.  Yes, I do have a bit of a black thumb…although honestly it’s not totally my fault, as even the sunniest window in our basement apartment barely provides adequate light for most plants.

I was very pleased at how the skirt turned out.  I really want to do more needle felting – the sculptural aspect was really exciting, and although Nimble Mymble’s body is…not the most beautiful thing in my possession…I feel like I could improve a lot with a few more kicks at the can.

Here’s Nimble Mymble with Rada’s other toys.  I love miniature stuffed toys so much!

So that’s the felt; now for the silk.

That right there is some of the toughest lace I’ve ever fought through.  A large part of the challenge has turned out to be the Turkish cast on recommended in the pattern (which is, incidentally, Rhodion from the latest Knitty): the cable of the circular needle that’s holding my live stitches until I finish the first half of this stole and go back to start knitting the other side (sometime next year, maybe?) fought every manipulation of every stitch so hard – and that’s on my second attempt, with this very flexible Addi Lace needle!  I won’t even tell you how it went when I first cast on with a random dollar store circular (my reasoning: I was guaranteed not to need that needle for anything else for however long this stole takes).  Now that I’m working on row 8 (halfway done the first of a total 26 repeats of the body pattern!), the cable’s effect is much mitigated by the flexibility of the half inch or so of knitting.

This yarn was hand dyed and, I believe, hand spun at Knotty By Nature, Victoria’s newest, poshest, and somehow also hippiest yarn store.  It is gorgeous.  It cost more than I have ever spent on a single skein of yarn before, even my coveted Wollmeise and it’s so worth it!  The subtle colours there are amazing, and I admit I hadn’t fully appreciated them until I started this pattern, looking closely and attentively at each and every stitch I make.  So far, this stole is working much better than the last pattern I attempted with this yarn, a feather and fan shawl that had a lot of stockinette that just looked bad in such a thin lace yarn on the smallest appropriate needles I had.  Because Rhodion is so much more open, the small patches of stockinette look just fine (it also helps that the needles are I think 0.5mm smaller – lucky find at the second hand store!).