What I Learned About Felting Today

Nova Knitter is going to a felting course tomorrow that is being held by the yarn shop about 45 minutes from town. Here's three things I learned today when I felted my three diagonal bags. (They still need buttons yet, so I won't class them as FOs.)

#1 -- Don't felt with tweed yarn unless you don't want or care to have the tweed look. I kinda had it in my head when this Patons Classic Wool Tweed chestnut tweed was felted that you wouldn't see the "tweeds" since it isn't heavily-tweeded to begin with. This also nixed the idea I had floating in my head for felted mittens knit with the chestnut tweed with an old gold motif. Guess if I wanna do that I need to make them non-felted.

I can't see it, can you see it? (The colored blips are the tops of my straight pins.)

#2 -- You really should have zippered pillow cases (which I don't). I had three bags, one bag free-flowing, the other two inside pillow cases loosely knotted. Upon checking it after about five minutes, the three bags were all free-flowing, and the i-cord straps nicely morphed into a big, bulging knot. Detangling wet i-cord is not nice.

#3 -- I decided on the light-colored blah bag to add a flower. Never made felted flowers before. I whipped it up out of my head, but if I ever decide to do it again I will try to make it a little smaller. I used tapestry wool (Heddy's suggestion awhile back -- thanks!), so that probably didn't felt as quickly as the Classic Wool, either. I just would have preferred the flower to be a wee bit smaller. Oh, well. It's a learning process.

Here's the loot from Halloween night. We went a tad bit further than we usually go, but there were also a lot of houses where no one was home. Most were like me, out taking their kids around trick or treating. My nephew worked this year, and hubby was away, so no one was home from 5:45 til almost 7:30. (Usually the nephew comes to hand out the candy, eating as much as he is giving out.) I normally get 40-50 kids, but since I missed the peak trick or treating time I only had 13 kids. Needless to say there was a lot of leftovers.

The cat was either hoping to get given away as a large and lumpy treat (which I doubt, he loves his Momma), or he was trying to steal some treats (doubt that, too, it's not his soft foo-foo), or he just liked the box (bingo!). Don't ask me why his face looks like that, guess he was trying to be scary.

My weekend to work. No curling this weekend, either, so I get ripped off on sleeping in. Tomorrow a big storm is due to pass through. I have my fingers crossed that power will go out by two, and I'll get to go home. Can't see anyone coming out in 100+km/hour wind and heavy rain. (Not unless some of the really hard-core knitters run out of yarn or something. And I know most of the hard-core knitters in town, and they have plenty of stash to rummage through without venturing out into a tropical storm. Radio just said it could gust up to 130km/hour or 80 miles/hour. Hold on -- another forecast says winds up to 140km/hour.)

Oh, yes -- here's the baby blanket from hell.

Still highly impatiently awaiting the sock yarn order. Personally I think it's been hijacked.

Heddy's got links to contests.

Happy knitting!

PS Don't know why we're open Friday nights -- not one customer! Typical.