Okay - I promised I'd write here yesterday, or the day before, or something like that, but life is kind of blurry and hectic and stuff like that, and I've been busy hospicing my butt off.  Seriously, like 300 miles and half a dozen house calls in the last 2 days.

But somewhere in there <lj user="umbran"> and I also made it to the Topsfield Fair, because it is a fall tradition and because I need my annual fill of deep-fried Oreos and giant pumpkins, and because this year I decided to try my luck in the crafts contest.

The Topsfield Fair is a big, delightful, traditional county fair, with 4H exhibits and flower and garden contests and sheep-shearing demos and deep fried everything on a stick, and a fairly prodigious crafts competition.  They have categories for just about anything you can imagine, and I love browsing and seeing all of the beautiful things people create, and every year I promise myself that next year I'll enter something of mine, and then forget.

But this year I'd finally made a showpiece - a rainbow shawl, from yarn I spun myself, that I was happy enough with to actually look up the rules for entry.  And, when I got to the website, I found out that there was a contest for hand-spun yarn, as well.  With a division for blends and synthetics.  And I'd just finished spinning my first custom-designed blended fiber (I wanted to get a certain effect, so I spun up two different kinds of yarn and plied them together).  So, what the hell.  I entered that too.  It was free, after all.

So we went to the fair yesterday, and we walked through the garden displays and hugged my friends at the forge and gawked at the freaky feather-footed chickens, and stopped by the sheep barn to pick up my yarn.

Where I was handed a 'Best In Division' ribbon and told that my prize money was in the mail, and that next year I really ought to consider entering more divisions.

And then we went to the crafts show.

Where my shawl was sitting next to a blue First Place ribbon.  (No; not best in show, but still first place in crocheted clothing).

I am utterly agog.  I was mostly entering for the sheer personal amusement of being able to say that I did.  I had no thoughts of actually winning, and I swear nowhere on the site did it say anything about prize money.   And I still think of myself as a novice spinner; it's only recently that I've even gotten to the point where I'm happy enough with my finished fiber to actually crochet with it.

Yowza.

I am an award-winning fiber artist.

It sounds all fancy and stuff when I put it that way.....

So, as I sit here and slowly regenerate vertebrae, I've at least had the time to work on some of my crafts. Right now I'm enthusiastically applying myself to a cross-stitch project that has been sitting neglected for the past several months, but before I started working on that I finished up a project that was a first for me - I crocheted something out of yarn I spun myself.

It wasn't a huge project, mostly because I only had a limited amount of fiber, but it's still a first. A year ago, when I started spinning, I found it hard to believe I'd ever get good enough at it to make yarn that I could actually work with. Last time I wrote here about my spinning I had made progress, but I was still far from actually skilled. And now... I'm still not perfect, but I made workable yarn. And then I made something with it.

The fiber itself was gorgeous - it was a gift from friends, and I had been putting off spinning it until I had at least enough skill to do it justice. It was a variegated wool/silk/sparkle blend, and I wanted to know that I could keep the colors as bright and clear as they were in the unspun fiber. And... I think I managed it.

( Pictures, hidden for those who are less than interested in fiber arts... )

Next step is to make something out of the yarn I spun and dyed myself (okay, with bess's help)....

I don't think I will ever stop feeling vaguely vain, self-conscious, and embarrassed about hanging my own crafts projects on the walls of my house - it feels way too much like bragging and begging for praise.

However, that's not quite enough to actually stop me from doing so. I just picked up my most recent piece of stitchery from the framers, and all of my plans for giving it away just kind of melted when I saw how truly rich and vibrant and *perfect* it looks. (Yes, framing stitchery costs a ridiculous amount, but I've realized it's worth saving up to do it.)

So tonight's project is an epic rearrangement of the art in our living room as I make space for the new piece and find somewhere else to move the cross-stitched mermaid that had previously been hanging in the location of honor....

I am still utterly in love with my spinning wheel.

I always worry when I pick up a new hobby - I'm never certain that I'm going to be any good at it, or that I'll give up before I put in enough effort, or that I'll get tired of it too quickly or won't be able to find time for it in between my other hobbies, or, or, or... until about half the time I wind up talking myself out of truly committing to trying whatever new thing has caught my eye.

Luckily, spinning has managed to avoid that pitfall. Since I got my wheel early this fall, I've been playing with it and practicing with it, and realizing that it's a lot easier and more fun to use than I had been afraid it would be. I don't know how much of this is due to the fact that I had plenty of practice with drop-spindle and how much is due just to the fact that I tend to like rhythmic, low-brain handcrafts, but either way, it's turning into one of my new favorite handcrafts.

It took a few practice skeins before I started getting something that resembled useable yarn, but another selling point of spinning is that I get visibly better with every hour of practice. And, while there's definitely a learning curve, it's not nearly as steep as I feared it would be. This afternoon I sat down to figure out Navajo plying (because a friend gave me a gorgeous hank of hand-painted variegated fiber for my birthday), guessing that I'd want to spin a few spindles of practice fiber and spend a week or two cursing and grousing before I figured it out.... only to have something consistent and, if not beautiful at least functional, by the end of the first spindleful.

I can do this. And it's fun, and it makes useful stuff. I think I've found something good....

( Vanity pictures of my first yarn hidden back here.... )

So about a year ago I found an adorable pattern for a crocheted shrug, that I decided to make for myself. And since I was in the mood to splurge, I decided to make it with the utterly gorgeous, sparkly, handpainted, $45/skein yarn that I fell in love with at the local boutique yarn store, instead of the recommended crochet cotton.

The project was set aside for the winter, since I didn't finish it in time to wear last summer, but I pulled it out a couple of weeks ago and have been working on it pretty steadily. In fact, I'm almost done with it.

This is how I know that I am going to wind up JUST short. Like, two motifs short, out of 54 joined together to make the darn thing.

Of course, I didn't keep the label for the yarn, which makes it a little hard to even contemplate buying more. Luckily, the yarn store I bought it at has a list of the brands they carry, and between that, Ravelry, and Google, I am pretty sure of exactly what fiber I'm working with - unfortunately, as far as I can tell, it's a colorway that doesn't quite exist anymore. At least, it's not listed on the brand's website.

So. I need to hie me down to Windsor Button and hope and pray that they still have this stuff in stock, a year later. Otherwise it looks like I will have a very expensive, time-consuming waste of fiber and energy on my hands. Unless some miraculous human being can get me a skein of Blue Heron Rayon Metallic yarn, in Blue Violet/gold, for which I will pay dearly in both cash and gratitude....

Of course, that will leave me with about 400 extra yards of the stuff. Two damn motifs. Maybe I can just leave the left sleeve open in the back as a fashion statement.

Many many years ago, back at the Sterling Forest Renaissance Faire, there was a booth that sold hair jewelry. They would put in standard hair wraps - wrap a bit of your hair with colorful cord - but then they'd somehow fix a little lobster claw onto the bottom, and sell beautiful charms and dangles and stranded beads and suchlike to clip into it. It meant having a little bit of my hair cut short, and over a couple of months the wrapping cord would get dingy from washing, but I loved it.

Unfortunately, I haven't found anyone who would do this for the past ten years or more, and my collection of hair jewelry has been sitting in my jewelry box, taunting me as it gathers dust.

Today, at the Topsfield Fair (a huge, fantabulously fun county fair full of parading Mounties and deep-fried Oreos and thousand-pound pumpkins and other delights) I saw a stall offering hair wraps, and decided to ask if they knew how to work in lobster claws. They didn't have any, it turned out, but they suggested wrapping in a charm with a loop at the bottom, and then putting a lobster claw on the jewelry bits at home. And they asked me if I wanted a wrap, or just a braid.

A braid? How so, I asked the woman running the stall. And she pulled her own hair forward to show me - braid a little bit of pretty metallic thread into the hair, and at the bottom just thread on some beads, attach the charm at the end, and then use the end of the thread as a decorative wrap that secures the charm on. And, looking at it (and at her prices) I realized.....

I could do this myself.

In fact, I have absolutely no idea why I didn't think of this before, given that I already have pony beads to braid into my hair at home. I just never extrapolated to lacing the lobster claw on myself. And I can do it with scrap thread and jewelry bits I already own, instead of paying someone else upwards of $20.

So now I have a tiny braid behind my left ear, threaded with silvery-teal metallic cord and tipped with pearly white beads and a little silver lobster claw. It's not perfect, but I figure over time I'll learn how to tighten the tip of the braid and hide it better under or inside the beads. I can hide it easily enough at work, and best of all, I can finally start wearing my beloved hair jewels again... and now that I know how to do it myself, I won't have to wait years between episodes of having it done!

I don't tend to talk a lot here about the things I make, because for the most part the things I make are pretty humdrum. I crochet blankets, or baby sweaters, or scarves, I do counted cross stitch, stuff like that. There are enough other talented fiber artists reading this that I figure I'm not making anything that a half-dozen other people (or more) reading this couldn't do, and that most likely the other folks reading honestly aren't that interested in my fiddly creations.

But I've recently started playing around with a new craft, and I'm happy enough with the piece I just finished that I want to show it off.

I've done a little bit of blackwork before (for those of you who aren't geeky fans of obscure stitchery, blackwork is a form of embroidery, usually reversible, that was popular in the Elizabethan era), but mostly just samplers, and I never practiced enough to get very good at it. So I have no idea quite why I volunteered to embroider a chemise for the current incumbent royalty in the local SCA. I've never done blackwork on clothing before, I've never taken on a big project like this, and I hadn't practiced on anything less serious. But it seemed like a good idea at the time, and I've done enough general stitchery that I figured it wouldn't be *too* hard....

( finished project pictures back here, hidden for the sake of your friends page and in case you're not enthralled by obscure embroidery.... )

Okay - I've got a lot of clever and creative people reading this, and a lot of crafters, and I've got a conundrum that's been stumping me, so I'm going to throw it out to the masses and see if y'all have any ideas.

I love wearing earrings, but I am occasionally absent-minded and clumsy, the end result of which is the fact that I own a lot of unpaired single earrings. I don't want to throw them away, for a lot of reasons. They're beautiful. They were gifts, and I have wonderful memories of the people who gave them to me, or times when I've worn them. I'm an incredible packrat, and it's just hard to throw anything away, even when I lost the other earring three houses ago and there's really no chance of me ever finding it again.

On the other hand, I can't wear them. While I do have two holes in my right ear, most of what I wear in the second hole are studs, if anything, and most of the singleton earrings are dangles.

So... any creative suggestions of what to do with single, unmatched earrings?

I have found the most marvelous thing in the world. I crocheted myself a pair of extra-warm, comfy socks out of soft, fuzzy wool, and I have become amazingly enamored of them.

Okay, so comfy socks may not seem so incredible to normal people. But my circulation isn't the greatest, and I've had test scores higher than my blood pressure, so my feet and hands are almost always uncomfortably cold. So, last night after spending a serious portion of the evening wandering around Boston Commons in not-quite-insanely cold weather, coming home and putting on these marvelous, warm, cozy, toasty, smooshy-soft socks was like sliding my feet into little pockets of joy. I know, I'm easily impressed. But feeling good is, well, good.

I could have fought off the cold and rung in the New Year outside, watching the fireworks. But deep down inside, I really appreciate comfort more than glitz - I know, you couldn't prove it by the way I dress, but I do. So, hot cocoa and comfy socks won out over freezing toes and sky-sparklies. Not as exciting, but I've tried both, and this was far more enjoyable. And truly awe-inspiring hot cocoa can fill my need for excess and celebration anytime.