Needlepunch Embroidery needles

Ok, keep in mind that the following are just my opinions on different punch needles. I'm in no way an expert on needle punch embroidery.

The first needle is the inexpensive needle from Dimensions at Michaels. I purchased the kit & needle separately but I just found out recently that Costco has a kit containing 3 patterns, floss, & needle for half the price I paid for just the kit. The needle was comfortable to use - it has a rubber grip - but the needle had a small burr on the tip. I sanded that off with fine sandpaper and it worked better but still catches slightly. I like the clear body of the needle so you can see how much floss you have left. The down side is you can't change the needle and it only comes in one size - 3 strand. You can't change the length of the loops as well.

The second needles are the Igolochkoy needles. The needles are smooth and goes into different fabrics nicely. Easy to make small even stitches and loops. Definitely a quality needle. The needles can be replaced easily if needed. It comes in 1-, 3-, & 6-strand needles. The loops can be adjusted but you have to cut the plastic sleeve to adjust the lengths. Not hard to do but finicky as you have to measure and cut the sleeves. Another thing is that if the sleeves didn't fit snug, it slides down as you're punching and that will change the lengths of your loops. The needles are small and were good for precise details but not comfortable to use for filling in large areas. It was hurting my hand after a while.

The third needle is the Cameo needle. The point is nice and sharp. The needles can be replaced and you can get different size needles like the Igolochkoy needles. The body of the holder is pen shaped, like the Dimension needle. Unlike the Dimension and the Igolochkoy needle, you can adjust the length of the loops easily with a slight twist. No little sleeves to cut and adjust. I can use this needle as long as I want without my wrist hurting. The downside is that you can't see inside so it's hard to tell how much floss you have left.

Oh Phooey!

I was not one of the fortunate few that got into the Maiwa workshop of her choice today. Not even second choice. Barely made it to the wait list. Bah! I was all set with my usual routine but at 9:55, I was called away from my desk and did not get back until almost 10:30. By then, it was too late. The phone lines were jammed for hours and I didn't get through until close to 2pm. Way too late. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that someone will pull out.

Things to do on the first day of Summer...

Photos curtesy of my son...dog helped.

Knitters are wonderful people!

There are so many wonderful knitters out there. I'm not just talking about knitter who knit beautifully but knitters who are caring and kind.

Check out the Rebuilding Greensburg project!

Fuzzy goodness

It's Saturday and I had to go into work today. There was an orientation for the new staff...all 125 of them. My bit only takes 20 minutes but I dreaded it since I hate speaking in front of a large crowd. To make myself feel better, I stopped off at Shan's Needleworks in New Westminster on the way home. I think this store is fast becoming my favourite LYS. That's really saying a lot considering there are a number of good LYS nearby.

A month ago, I picked up some Merino/Alpaca from Shan's and it was so wonderful to work with! The label just say Merino/Alpaca Super Soft Yarn. They're based in Ontario. Anyway, the yarn knited up really nicely. I made a little teddy bear for a friend's baby shower. It was really hard to give that away. Sorry, no pics...didn't have time. It was one of those times when you procrastinated and had to knit like crazy all night long to finish it for the next day. I seem to do my best work that way.

Since then, I've been thinking how wonderful this yarn would be as a cardigan. The most the store had was 10 balls of any dye lot. Deep down I knew it wasn't enough for a sweater but I managed to convinced myself otherwise. I'm good at that. I bought all 10 balls of the very soft blue/grey merino/alpaca. I got home and my brain cleared. The total yardage is 1100. It's not even close...not for a cable sweater. I think this might become a snuggly shawl or something like the EZ Rib Warmers.

Merino & Alpaca in all its fuzzy goodness.

7 Random facts about me...

1. I remembered watching Kennedy's funeral on TV when I was two years old. We were still living in Hong Kong at that time. I remembered my parents waking me up in the middle of the night to go to my grandparent's house.

2. Caffine doesn't seem to affect me. I can have a cup of coffee right before going to bed and will sleep soundly.

3. I don't like price labels on my can goods. I peel them off before putting the groceries away.

4. I always wash new clothes before wearing.

5. I'm right-handed but play a lot of sports left-handed, thanks to my brother.

6. I love to read. When I was 8, I decided to read every single book in the school library. Fortunately, it was a small school library. I started at one end of the room and went through the shelves systematically. I probably missed a few books here & there but for the most part, I did read everything I could...including encylopedias.

7. I've never watched a football game. This fact is amazing considering that I work for a major football arena. The most I've seen is the last 5 minutes of a Grey Cup game.

Recycled bag

Look what you can do with 12" of leftover pant legs! The material was cut off from the pants I hemmed up last week. Ok...I "hemmed" them up to capri length so there was a LOT of material removed. Enough to make a bag to show off my needlepunch sheep. Even the strap is recycled. It's the drawstring from the waist band. There's still a bit of material left that I was thinking of making a little change purse.

It would have been such a waste not to use the leftover material.

Sunny Sunday

Everything is growing and loving this early summer heat. According to the Weather Net site, the hottest it got today around here was 26 deg C but the "feels like" temp was 32. Too hot for this time of the year. I'm actually looking forward to a bit of rain this coming week. The garden will be happy.

Things are growing well, with the exception of the tomato plants. Not sure what happened this year. The plants are a little on the small side but we transplanted them anyway. We still have 6 left - 3 hanging cherry tomatoes and 3 zebra tomatoes - that need a good home.

St. Johnswort is one of my favourite herbal plant. To others, it's an invasive weed that causes more harm than good. The little black spots are not bugs but pores filled with oil. Thus the name, Hypericum Perforatum. This particular strain is grown for its high yeild in this oil.

When it starts to flower, I'll harvest the flowers and leaves for the oil. It will be used for skin ointments for bruises & scratches. The oil itself is wonderful for any skin irritations. I've heard that it's a good dye plant as well but I've never dyed with this.

Not much knitting and spinning was accomplished this weekend. Everything stuck to my sweaty hands. This morning we stopped by the local Farmer's market for fresh veggies. There was someone selling homespun yarn. Not bad stuff. She's mostly self-taught from the internet. She was interested in the local spinning community so I told her all about the classes at Place des Art and the Coquitlam Weavers & Spinners guild. Heh!

Posting for the sake of Posting

Nothing new and exciting.

Saturday was spent at Eat! Vancouver. A trade show devoted to food and all things food related. Stuffed ourselves full of free samples there. Rolled home and spent the rest of the day doing nothing.

Sunday was spent doing laundry and a bit of house cleaning. Hubby was inspired by the big BBQs and Smokers at the show and decided to roast a duck on his BBQ. The cookbook said one hour...which translate to almost 3 hours real time. Needless to say, dinner was very late. Delicious but late. The meal was roasted duck with lemon glace, grilled asparagus, and sauted morel mushrooms with garlic.

Shuttleworks is fantastic! I ordered my new frame on Thursday and it arrived Monday! Love getting packages at work. Hate forgetting packages at work. I was looking forward to putting together my new gripper frame tonight.

Work is going ok. I think I'm slowly settling into this new position. I picked up a new flash drive last week. It's briefcase of the new millenium, I think. Stuff files into that thing and you can bring work home. yay. Actually, I don't mind bringing some stuff home. It takes me 10 minutes to do something at home that would have taken me a couple of hours to do at work with all the interuptions from the phone and people.

Tammy tagged me for a meme. I have to come up with 7 random facts about me. Have to think about this one...

Back to work!

It's Monday night and it's back to work tomorrow. I really need to win the lottery. Long weekends are just not long enough.

What did I accomplished this weekend?

1. Road trip to Quiltopia. It's a fun place! Almost tempted to try quilting again but had to tell myself over and over again that I have an unfinished quilt at home. I did find out about a place nearby that will machine stitch my quilt.

2. Didn't spin any more of the linen but worked on my silk noil and carded some more of the Shetland on the drum carder.

3. Accomplished 1 & half sleeves on the green cardigan. Still half a sleeve to go.

4. Did not even touch the books needing binding.

5. Did not come up with a project for the fibre challenge. Help!

What else did I do?

1. Bought some wool fabric - Fabricana was having a sale! Beautiful wool melton on sale! I picked up a metre of tweed for texture and 2 metres of a pale baby blue (ick!) - they didn't have any white or beige in the weight I wanted.

2. Felted, dyed, & separated the wool fabric. Some of the pieces will be overdyed for accents at another time.

3. Drew out my pattern for another rug.

4. Hemmed up 2 pairs of pants that have been around since last summer.

5. Started a pair of chevron socks for my take-along knitting with the Cherry Tree Hill sock yarn I got at Fibre Fest. I really love the Chevron pattern from Elan. It's easy to remember and make socks less boring to knit than stockinette stitch. It's also easier to keep track of rows too. Every pattern is two rows...just count the YO's. No need to carry around a row counter. Perfect for a take-along project.

On the bright side...

...the new issue of Cloth, Paper, Scissors arrived today! Along with my new Moo cards! Yeah, I jumped on the Moo bandwagon. The cards were too cute to pass up. They're about half the size of a regular business cards. You can have whatever you want printed on the back. The front is an assortment of your photos...or you can have them all the same.

Work was crazy today so it was great to come to find stuff in the mail.

This weekend is the May long weekend. I have plans.

1. Road trip to Quiltopia.
2. Spin some more linen.
3. Finish the sleeves on the green sweater.
4. Finish binding the three books sitting on my work table for the past two months.
5. Think of a project for my skein for the Fibre Challenge.

Woohoo! Look! It's linen!

Ugly linen but it's linen! The roving was all prepared so you don't have to do anything to it but spin it. Exactly what I was looking for. I've never tried the preparation process with flax but have done it with nettle for papermaking. Dew retting takes forever (months). A process that's interesting to try it at least once and that's about it.

Colleen at Wild Rose sugggested wrapping the roving in a towel. The moisture from your hands will gum the fibres together. I found some more tips on the internet. Spin counter-clockwise, low twist and very little tension. Wet spinning is not a problem as that's how I spin my paper. All that moisture does make your fingers chapped and wrinkled. You can spin this roving wet or dry but wet will give you a smoother thread.

It took a long time to spin this little bit! Well, I was looking for a new fibre challenge and this stuff is really a challenge. I feel like I should go spin some cotton to make me feel better...just kidding.

Total fibre weekend!

As usual, Fibre Fest was an absolute blast! What I love about Fibre Fest (aside from the obvious fibre) is the people. There is no such thing as a stranger there. You pick up a skein of yarn or a bag of roving and someone will come up and start talking to you. Total strangers will become enablers.

This year's Fibre Fest was a little different because it was combined with the Country Life show. I think it worked because it gave my poor husband something to look at other than fibre. I did noticed that there seemed to be more yarn and a little less raw fibre than previous years. There were certainly more animals! I fell in love with a beautiful alpaca named Louis.

Total haul for today:

4 bags of prepared flax rovings, ready for spinning from Wild Rose
1 bag of Fox Fire organic cotton from Wild Rose.
1 skein of Cherry Tree Hill sock yarn kit
1 Sock blocker key chain with mini Opal yarn
2 skeins of Laura Fry's handdyed bamboo
1 bag of alpaca/silk with Angelina fibre from Princess Farms



The little sock blocker and mini Opal was too cute to pass up! I think I'll keep the Opal intact and use some of my leftover sock yarns to knit the mini sock. Is it strange to want to change the sock on my keychain to match the socks I'm wearing?

In addition to the Fibre Fest stuff today, I picked up 4 skeins of linen at the Guild meeting on Thursday night. It was all Rusty's fault...I was doing so well not buying anything until she calls out that there's no tax! I'm only human.

On the way home, we stopped off to pick up a package at the post office...

It's a fabric cutter from Harry M. Fraser & Co. It comes with your choice of a cutter head and I ordered two additional cutters. I used to have an old one - not a Fraser cutter. It was a very old plastic thing that didn't cut very well. The cutter can't be sharpened. It was something I picked up secondhand long time ago. It was so annoying having to go over all the cuts by hand because it never cut all the way through. I always wanted a good one. These things are handy to have around.

So, yeah, I missed Friday with my friends but I think I did quite well fibre-wise. :D

Well, that sucks!

Everyone is off today and tomorrow for some kind of conference. So I'm working Friday because we have a newbie and a temp in. That means no Fibre Fest for me on Friday. People who are going on Friday, don't buy everything up...save some fibre for me. I'll be there Saturday but it's not the same. All my friends will be there on Friday.

:whine:
:whine:

The Spin-in will be on Saturday afternoon. I'm thinking of bringing my wheel but I may be too busy shopping. Shopping for fibre always makes me feel better. :D

My Igolochkoy needles have arrived!

My Igolochkoy punch needles arrived today! I can't wait to try them out. The needles are really well made - no burrs to catch on the fabric. I was going to wait until I finished my green sweater first but just had to try these needles out. Gail Bird at http://www.gailbird.com/ is really fast! I just ordered the needles last week!

It's four or five sleeps to Fiber Fest - four sleeps if I go on Friday and five sleeps if I go on Saturday. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it's going to be Friday. This will depend on how things go at work this week.

Another one!

Looks like a couple of the loops are out of place. That's ok...I can just nudge them back with a needle. This one is 2.5"x2.5". The fabric is Irish linen. I read somewhere that you shouldn't use 100% cotton as the needle will cut the fabric instead of punching through. I only had 100% cotton Aida or Irish linen. I thought the linen would be stronger. It was difficult to work with as the needle did cut the fabric strands. I had to make sure the needle punched between. If I were to use linen again for punchneedle, I think it would be better to wash the fabric first. It was really stiff to work with. Good for cross stitch but not so good for punchneedle.

Gillian, thanks for the info on your rug. It sounds like yarn was used instead for bigger rugs. I can't imagine how long it would take to make something that size with embroidery floss! :0

Punchneedle Embroidery

Look at what I made!



It's punchneedle embroidery. Last week, I saw that Quiltopia is offering a workshop on punchneedle embroidery. I did a web search and came up with a lot of references & instructions. It doesn't look that hard. Serendipity (aka local newspaper) brought a Michael's 40% off coupon to my door and pretty soon, I was punching away on this kit. As long as you don't look at it close up, it looks fine. The back is really messy but not bad for my first effort, I think. It doesn't look finished with the background plain so I might do something about that.

Things to remember:

Punchneedle work is done on a small scale. Finished pieces are usually no bigger than 5". Small is good.

Get a good needle. The one Michael's sell is ok and cheap but if you're interested in doing this more than once, invest in a good needle. The tiny burr at the end of my needle kept catching on the fabric. The two that seems to be preferred by other punchneedle enthusiasts are Cameo and Igolochkoy. Locally, Quiltopia and Shan's Needleworks sells Cameos.

The suggested fabric is weaver's cloth. I'm not sure what that is. The fabric in the kit looks similar to a 28 count Aida cotton. Possibly even 32 count.

Things to do...

...at the crack of dawn Saturday morning...



...while watching English Premier League soccer.

That's the tussah silk noil that I've been picking through for a while now. No matter how thorough you are picking out chunks of VM, you always find more as you're spinning. I carry a small ziplock baggie of the noil with me and pick through it whenever I have a few minutes. It's actually better than knitting for short spurts of free time. No worries about finishing the row.

Midweek blahs

I really need to take a picture of the purple cardigan before I frog the trim. Yes, the sleeves are all sewn in but I'm not happy with them...the sewing looks a bit sloppy even after blocking. I really need to work on my finishing techniques. The trim is a picot edge all around the sweater. It looks good lying on the blocking board but not so good on me. I think I'll put this away for now. Maybe when I feel up to it, I'll knit a cable rib around the sweater.

Good thing Fiber Fest is less than 3 weeks away...I need pick-me-up. Kris's last day is the same day as Fiber Fest. I'm really going to miss her. We've been working together for a lot of years.

Just cuz...

In case you ever need to make your own cow...

Mine is sitting by my computer. Heh!