On and Off My Needles

So far, I haven't really talked about my knitting. I knit all the time. I take it with me everywhere and do it whenever I get a spare moment.

Most of my knitting right now is for the Harry Potter Knitting and Crochet House Cup and Christmas presents. Mostly, they are overlapping.

The Charms assignment was to knit something to make someone else happy. I started making my mom's Christmas present.

He is a little elephant made out of the fist yarn that I spun on my drop spindle. I spun it from roving that I dyed with Easter egg dyes.

Here is the yarn:

It was made from this roving:

After starting it, I found out that out that one of the other students (in the Harry Potter competition) had her house burn down. I couldn't do much for her, but I could pray for her and knit her this scarf. When bad things happen I'm always cold, so I thought a scarf would be appropriate.


The Transfiguration assignment is to felt something. I've never felted something before, so this is quite exciting. I'm making slippers for Darren's mom for Christmas. Here they are prior to felting with a slipper sock for size comparison. These things are huge. I'm going to felt them this weekend while washing laundry.

The Potions assignment is to make something out of a lot of different yarns. I'm using this opportunity to use up the leftovers from making longies. I'm making Darren a project bag for his crochet. It's going to be felted too. I'm using a lot of different colors, then I'm going to overdye it blue. This should give all of the colors a blueish hue, so they all go together nicely. I've never overdyed before this, so I'm excited about this project too. Here's the bag so far. The long piece is the bottom.

The Herbology assignment is to dye yarn using plants or fungi. I used ivy to dye the handspun that was on the boobins of the spinning wheel. It was a very interesting a stinky project. If you choose to dye with plants, do it outside, or else your livingroom will smell really bad. I put a bunch of ivy leaves in my new dyeing crockpot with some water.

I cooked the leaves until the water turned green. Then I threw the yarn in. Don't throw wool yarn into hot water unless the yarn is already hot. It will felt. I didn't care to much about this yarn (it was really poorly spun), so I didn't pay much attention to the whole felting thing. I cooked the yarn (while in the other room the other room) unitl Darren went down the hall and commented on the smell. I went to check on it and ventilate the house. The yarn was green and the water was mostly clear.

So I dumped the whole thing into the sink to wash and rinse. Using cold water to wash and rinse felted the yarn more than it had already felted. Don't put hot yarn into cold water. It will felt.
Here is how it turned out:

I'm debating whether to throw it out or make a pot holder out of it. Since, I can't throw away yarn, it probably will become a pot holder.

I have a few other projects on my needles, but I'm not working on them right now, so I'll talk about them later.