Hooray!!  my favorite fiber festival of the entire year is right around the corner!!
This weekend is the annual OR Flock & Fiber Festival:
www.flockandfiberfestival.com ~ every year on the 4th Sat of Sept in Canby, OR.
OFFF has the flavor of what I imagine a county fair used to be like, and it’s a fiber-lover’s dream.  This year’s [...]

Ya know, it’s hard to blog when the things you are doing are (a) things that you can’t write about or (b) boring.
In the second category lately are many administrative things, like setting up fall class schedules and working on websites.  The good news is, the Polar Bear Patterns site is coming along nicely — [...]

Wow!  Here we are at the end of the UFOlympics, and the decathlon results are in…
… and I made it!

0.  Brioche st hat:  shop sample for class.
1.  Bear mittens:  one left to finish; then it’s time to take ‘em to the zoo.
2.  Bunny slippers:  make ears, felt, attach, and add eyes and tails.
3.  Glam rock vest:  [...]

Yes, you may well have been questioning why there is a total of 12 UFO’s on my UFOlympic "decathlon" list.  (Actually, there are 13, because I had to add one UFO #0 that I forgot about when making the original list.)  But it’s a good thing.
Truthfully, I could probably do at least two decathlons with [...]

Hey, there – just a quick plug today, for my pal Deb’s mini-sock club that she’s just unveiled!
(ed. note — it’s not a club for mini-socks, it’s a mini-club for full-size socks.)
It’s a set of three different sock yarn + original pattern combos, with the second pattern being designed by Yours Truly.  Deb is doing the [...]

Hey, are you getting as sick of the UFOlympics as I am?
It was fun to begin with — it was great to get a couple of projects out of the way and all that — but I’m getting a definite feeling of stuck-in-a-rut now.  Maybe this is why the real Olympics only last a couple of weeks, [...]

Well, it’s nearly halfway through the timeframe I set for my personal UFOlympics.  (In fact, it’s only about 40% of the way through, if you don’t count that "vacation" time I spent with strep.)
And while I’ve been waiting for you guys to decide what I’m supposed to do about the bunny eyes on the slippers, I haven’t [...]

OK, so I know I said I wasn’t going to work on the UFOs during my "vacation".
Well, that was before I got strep throat on the very first day of my "vacation".  I mean, it’s not like I had this penciled in on my calendar:

Friday morning:  Drop off DH at airport.  Teach Friday group class.
Friday [...]

Wow, this UFOlympics thing is getting to be quite an eye-opener for me.
For one thing, I have started to realize just how little time I devote to knitting in the course of a standard week.  I mean to the actual act of pulling one loop of yarn through another.  Sure, I spend plenty of time [...]

UFO #1, the fifth bear mitten:  FINISHED 07/09/08.
Final time:  2 days!
Yarn:  donated acrylic stuff.
Pattern:  from Twisted.
announcer’s voiceover:  She’s certainly maintaining a very competitive pace thus far, but can she possibly keep it up throughout the whole event?  We’ll have to wait and see.
I threw a 6-inch ruler into this picture for scale, so you can see that a single bear mitten [...]

Ummm… I have good news, and bad news.
First, the good news:  UFO #0, Brioche st hat:  FINISHED 07/07/08.
Final time (offical Swiss, of course):  2 days.
The crowd goes wild!
Yarn:  Manos del Uruguay silk & wool.
Pattern:  my own Polar Bear Pattern.
Shameless plug:  this is a sample for a class I’ll teach at the Knitting Bee in Sept. 
 

OK, the bad news:
#1:  I [...]

Well:  I’ve been seriously winnowing out the UFO pile in preparation for the Games of Summer.  I’ve had to revise my rule a bit, and I think I’ve got a goal now.

Original rule:  Finish all current UFO’s by the end of the Summer Games.

OK — perhaps you’ve already figured this out, but this is sheer lunacy.
After taking a [...]

OK, I got game.  (Whatever that means.)
I also still got plenty of UFO’s.
So, here goes:  I’m officially entering the 2008 Summer UFOlympic Games.
Welllll, kind of officially.  There’s some wiggle room there, I think.
Background:  As far as I can tell after a whole 5 minutes of online research, the UFOlympics concept started in 2006 with this blogger’s [...]

Hey, we’re back from our trip to [Sasquatch->] over the Memorial Day Weekend.  And it was an interesting weekend.
(BTW, this post really does include something pretty interesting about sock heels too, although that bit’s way at the end.  Just skip down there if you must.)
Sasquatch is a big 3-day music festival held annually in an [...]

The Farmhouse will not be open full-time this summer, due to a family illness.
 

Farmhouse Knit Shop
 New Summer Hours

Thursday through Saturday, 10 – 6
 
closed Sunday – Wednesday
 
 

On Tuesday, I and several hundred other PDX area knitters spent an enjoyable evening with the Yarn Harlot!
I didn’t win the Oregonian’s contest to tag along when they interviewed her, but I did get an honorable mention –

A few people suggested the Oregon Zoo, but Tess Mattos had the best slant on that idea. She’d take [...]

In no particular order, here’s some great pix I’ve received of bear mittens, in response to the free Polar Bear Pattern offer!!
 

In case you still haven’t heard, here’s the short scoop: 
There are bears in China that need mittens.  (For a full explanation, please see the previous posts in this series.)
The [Oregon Zoo ->] and the yarn shop [Twisted [...]

Due to personal reasons,
Sandi has cancelled the Wednesday night "Knit Night"
at Farmhouse Knit Shop
for the rest of March and April 2008.
 
Watch this space for more info on when Knit Night will resume!

Don’t forget!!
  
Thursday, March 20, is "Won’t You Wear a Sweater?" Day, in honor of what would have been Mister Rogers‘ 80th birthday (Fred Rogers died in 2003 of stomach cancer).
"Mr. McFeely" (David Newell) appears in a video made for the occasion, which is available at youtube as well as the link above, and it’s worth watching if only for the [...]

I’m pleased to announce that my first "cheater" bear mitten is completed!!
These things are BIG.  I happened to have my once-a-day can of Coke with me, so I included it in the picture for scale.
The only reason it is already completed is because, as I admitted in the previous post, I knit the midsection on a [...]

It’s Saturday night of our designated "Fun Day", and DH is out at a buddy’s house watching college tournament hockey, drinking beer and eating crap.
What am I doing?  I’m turning my studio into a bear mitten factory.
Yes, that IS my idea of fun.
We stopped by the OR Zoo today, and of course I went to [...]

The title of this post may sound like the title of an adorable childrens’ book waiting to happen:  but the reality is just sad.
OK, while they aren’t exactly my favorite POLAR BEARS…  there are some Malayan Sun Bears on the other side of the globe that need some help.  Knitted help, in fact.
It seems there are some [...]

On Saturday, DH and I went downtown to play a little bit in the nice-ish weather.
His idea of fun was to pick up some tickets for the upcoming Joe Jackson show, have lunch someplace new, and take some photos of the downtown bridges.
My idea of fun was to stop by and check out a new yarn shop.
Fortunately for me, [...]

Both my sister and a college friend recently sent me copies of this Wall Street Journal article about knitting.
More specifically, it’s about "Sock Wars", where the idea is that everyone playing the game is an "assassin" and has an assigned  "target".  You are supposed to "assassinate" that person by knitting them a pair of socks, and then you send [...]

Well, this sucks.
I was all set to go to the [Madrona Fiber Arts->http://www.madronafiberarts.com/] festival for the first time.
It’s pricey, but after several of my friends/students went last year and took a “Tailored Knitting” class with [Jean Wong->http://www.knittingwithjean.com], they all said, “You need to take this class!”  Lots of math, lots of persnickety finishing and fitting.  [...]