Upper Midwest Alpacas 3rd Annual Fiber Festival

Fate was working for me this year and the Upper Midwest Alpacas 3rd Annual Fall Fiber Festival was held on my B-day! So my hubby and I headed out to Hopkins, MN and spent an hour or two looking over local fibers. This is only the second fiber festival I have been to and it was tiny compared to the Shepherd's Harvest Sheep & Wool Festival I went to in May. This festival was held in a school Gym and there were about 50 vendors set up.

I had an interesting talk with the vendor selling corn yarn about the milling process. He said that they had to change mills because of the road construction crews discovering that a biodegradable corn fiber mesh could be used to stop hillside erosion and now the mills are pumping out this corn based mesh like crazy. So the mill that would spin his fiber bumped him to a different mill, (smaller mill) and the fiber he got from this other mill is WAY softer! Interesting! (I found an article about this here if anyone is interested.)

We also had a nice chat with a lady selling Wassail cider and jelly. We picked up some of her spice packets and jelly for gifting this holiday (shhhhh) and she admired my Lucy Bag. She told me that she wanted to knit a bag and felt it and she went to the yarn store and the yarn cost her $200.00! She was horrified. :) I think I have gotten used to the sticker shock of good wool. Also - I thought it funny that she was horrified about the cost of yarn when every booth around her was selling expensive luxury yarn. Hee hee.

There were a lot of chatty people here who would just walk up and start talking to you. It was pretty welcoming and comfortable. I walked the entire circuit and then went back for the yarn I HAD to have. I ended up with four skeins.

This is 7.50 oz (469 Yards) of Black Alpaca from Enchanted Meadows in Wausau, Wisconsin. I believe this is about a Sport Weight (or DK?) and it's just squishy goodness. I new when I touched it that it was coming home with me. So. Awesome!

This Blue Lusciousness is 300 Yards of 100% Suri in Sport Weight from Riverside Alpacas in Lake City, MN. This yarn is so cool in my hands - it's almost silky to the touch. It is fun to just pet it over and over. I had to have this blue - my picture doesn't show the depth of color here - but it's just wonderful.

This skein is an Angora Rabbit and Wool Blend (60/40), it is worsted weight, and it holds 300 yards. This is from Angora Gardens from Clarks Grove, MN. They had really soft samples knit up at their booth and it made me want Angora Yarn in the worst way! This blend was pretty wonderful to touch and a little closer to my price range than the full angora I found sold at another booth. (Boy is it awesome to squish though!) This is the thickest yarn I purchased - which is funny since I am a bulky weight girl in most of my knitting.

And my final purchase was this lovely hand dyed sock yarn from Knit in Class Fiber Studios. The colors of the yarn were so wonderful! And the yarn is just squishy goodness. I try not to buy to much Superwash yarn, but this is a Superwash Sock yarn - in the colorway Smoke. 460 yards of soft yarn. Very lovely. I think it will make a nice shawlette.

I am quite pleased with my Stash Enhancement and have been having fun feeling the yarn and trying to think about what it wants to be knit into. Ravelry here I come! :)

Birthday Girl! Wahooo!

Today is my 40th Birthday.  Naturally I need to start my 40's off with a bang and I woke bright and early at 2:15 this morning and could not get back to sleep. Around 3:30 I got up and came out to my computer and started watching video's on Utube on how to Crochet. I always want to learn how to crochet around my birthday partly because I spent one of my birthdays over at my mom's house and we sat out on the back porch and she tried to teach me how to crochet. It didn't stick. I ended up missing a few steps in the process and the scarf I tried to crochet lost stitches every row (I suspect I forgot to chain one at the end of each row) and I gave up.

This morning I found a really nice tutorial on UTube and started following along. I tried first on my left over Sheep(ish) yarn from my KAL Cowl, but quickly decided it wasn't working and grabbed a ball of Sugar 'n Cream cotton instead. (Probably not the best choice for a beginner in crochet as the yarn is splitty - but I have knit about a bajillion wash clothes in the last 10 years - so I am pretty comfortable with this yarn.) I chained 21 stitches on my Size H hook and started trucking. A few short hours later and I have my very first finished crochet project!

I discovered a few things when I made this:
1. Crochet is soooooo fast! My knit wash clothes take days for me to make. This was my first one and I finished in hours. Wow!
2. Counting is important. I have a tendency toward confusing where the hook should go in, so I sometimes increase or decrease unintentionally. So I methodically counted every row until I had several inches done and that seemed to help.
3. Using variegated yarn is SUCH a great idea! The yarn I was working was always a different color from the stitch I was attaching too. It really helped me keep things straight in my head and I think I will stick to variegated yarns while I learn.
4. Ripping back is easy. I had to get over my "fear of frogging" but once I found out how easy it was to clean up a mistake I was ripping back all the time. It was great!

I am very pleased with my first crochet and I am going to keep working at it. I really want to be both a crocheter and a knitter. I think the two lend well to each other (crochet edges on knit items are awesome. Crocheting my knit squares together rather than hand stitching??? Um. Heck yeah!) and I would love to wear both crowns with pride.

In other knitting news, I was looking at my Caron.com weekly e-mail and saw that Vickie Howell had posted pictures and info about the Knit A Long  that I participated in. When I went to look at her blog I saw that my picture and one of my comments I made in the Ravelry Forums was posted on her Blog! It was strange seeing a photo of myself on someone else's blog! But admittedly pretty cool and probably the closest I will ever come to FAME so it was kind of neat. :) Sadly I am called "Literary Lady" not LiteraryLadybug - but what cha gonna do? It's still me! ;)

Today is Saturday and Yes, even though I was on vacation all week and even thought today is my 40th Birthday, I weighed in. I don't know what diet God or Goddess was watching over me, but I somehow managed to lose weight again this week! I lost 1.8 lbs this week which puts my Weight Watchers total at -18.3 and my overall at -33.3 lbs. I also got the excitement of buying smaller clothes this week! Smaller underwear, smaller jeans, smaller tops. It's so exciting! I feel so good! And to go into a dressing room with jeans a size smaller than I was wearing into the store and have them fit like a dream? Yeah. I almost got emotional in the dressing room. (Meaning - I had a moment of Holy Shit! and then a moment of proud tears and then I threw open the door and strutted around the area to show off my awesomeness to my husband.)

I am so proud of myself for losing this weight. I am excited to continue on my journey, and I can't wait to see where I end up!

Have a wonderful weekend everyone!

Landmarks and Goals

It's Saturday morning and that means it's Weight In day! Today I hit a goal that I have been dreaming of for literally years. When I weighed in on my Wii it told me I was Overweight rather than Obese! I have never had it tell me I was anything other than Obese! Wahoo! I had hoped my little Mii figure would shrink a little in size, but it doesn't look like it. I am pretty sure I just barely crossed the line - but I will take it!

This week I lost -1.1 lbs, my Weight Watchers weight loss is -16.5 lbs, and my total weight loss is -31.5 lbs.

With the hitting of this goal and turning the big Four-Oh a week from today, I find my thoughts are turning to the significance of numbers and goals quite a bit. I told my husband that I wanted to hit 40 like a ton of bricks and not have 40 hit me like a ton of bricks. And I am very pleased with where I am in my health quest and am definitely feeling stronger and more in control of my life than I have previously. I know that the day I turn 40 I will really only be one day older than I was on the day I was 39, but I can't help thinking about the importance that is placed on a number or a date. I think because I am learning on a daily basis that you can erode negative habits just like you can erode positive ones, I am seeing the significance of every single day and how it can really impact your life to work towards something a little at a time but consistently. So I have to wonder, should I place so much weight on a number? My head tells me to celebrate a landmark, do a small victory dance, glance down the hill so I can see how far I have some, and then got back to climbing my mountain.

As for turning 40? It sure beats NOT turning 40!

So as a birthday present to myself I am off on vacation for the next week. I started doing this a couple years back after an unfortunate Birthday spent at work and having to scoop a customers vomit out of the sink in our public restroom. Yeah. Awesome. I vowed I would do my best to NOT have to work on my Birthday again, and so far I have been pretty lucky.

I am already thinking ahead and wondering how I will do on my health quest this week. A little voice in my head, the very one I keep stomping on with my workout sneakers, keeps telling me you only turn 40 once. You should have a slice of birthday cake when you turn 40! You should celebrate your weight loss and put on a fancy dress and go out to eat! Hu. Where does that voice come from? I cannot deny the importance that food has on a celebration. And after my Birthday is Thanksgiving and then on to Christmas. And the family will praise you for getting healthy in the same breath that they cram food down your throat. So I think I will be thinking about this a lot over the next month or two.

In other news, I figured out how to get my WIPS progress meters on my blog - so I have those staring at me now. I really need to get some of those cranked out and over with. My first tread-mill afghan has so little left to do! I would love to have that one completed before I finish knitting the squares for the second one. (And I am getting close so I really need to move my butt here!)

Last night I started my second mitt on my set of Wine about Winter Mitts (free pattern Easy Half Mitten 106 on Ravelry) and because I started it late at night when I was tired I messed up the ribbing and ended up frogging it out.Will start over again when I am NOT exhausted. Better success ratio.

Have a wonderful weekend everyone!