Dec
New at DaniDo Crafty
Hawt Cocoa Mixes. Yes, you read that correctly. I decided to add hot cocoa to my ‘Yummy’ category in my shop. I currently have a basic hot cocoa mix and a spiced cocoa mix (which is my favorite), I’ll be adding a few more mixes to the shop in the next few days as well. These are only going to be available for the next two months or so, just through the yuckiest part of winter. I’ll be keeping the teas up year round though.
I’ve also got several hanks of one of a kind colorways of lace weight coming into the shop in the next two days. I need to get some decent pictures and then I’ll be posting them. I’ll also be adding some new blended spinning batts from hand dyed fiber that I dyed and also bought from other indie dyers. I have a hard time dyeing the milk and bamboo fibers so I just buy it from the folks who I know do a good job. (Mainly Roo at Moonwood Farm )
In designing news the Unique Sheep neckwarmer I recently designed has an official name: The Flounce Neckwarmer and should be available for download in the next week or so. It’s currently being reviewed by my wonderful tech editor to double check for glaring errors or incomprehensible directions and as soon as she’s done with her red pen and I’ve made the appropriate corrections we should have one beautiful pattern ready to go.
I am also working on a simple but elegant loose cowl in the FibroFibers handspun that wonder spinner/dyer/all around awesome gal Jen sent me. I have to say as testament to the durability to this fingering weight handspun, I have knit and ripped out at least 15 projects with this same single skein and not lost or frayed a bit of the hank of yarn. It’s not pilling, splitting, fraying, nada. I am rough on yarn when I’m designing, I design by knitting and then I write down what I do. So if something doesn’t work for me, I rip it back out and start over. This means for any given pattern the yarn I’ve used may be frogged a dozen or more times before it becomes an actual finished object. Durability in a yarn is incredibly important to me. Handspun by nature is a bit more delicate than commercially spun yarn for the obvious reasons (a human did it instead of a machine) and fingering weight handspun especially delicate. Not this yarn! Delicate in appearance, durable like a pack mule in practice! Jen is a relatively new spinner (picked it up this year I believe) but she’s obviously a prodigy because her handspun is awesome. I also have some of her hand dyed yarn as well and can testify to how beautiful that is as well. I strongly recommend her yarns. Plus you can’t go wrong with a business that donates part of their proceeds to charity, FibroFibers donates a portion of each sale to Fibromyalgia research. (Which is a cause that is close to my heart, my Dad suffers from Fibromyalgia in addition to other health issues, as does Jen herself.)
I recently started a new group on Ravelry as well specifically for my designs (separate from the Choose Your Own Adventure Club group) which will hopefully be a place where we can do KAL’s and discuss any issues people are having with my patterns, I’m asking for test knitters over there for things and just general conversation is going on. You can check it out here.
As soon as I get those lace weights up in the shop I’ll send out a tweet and post a blog about them, but in the meantime head on over to either The Unique Sheep or FibroFibers and get some of their great yarns so you’ll be stocked up and ready to go when these patterns release!
