It has been a few weeks since I last posted a more in depth review of my current knit, crochet and spin projects. I felt there was not much to be reported despite working every day at least for half an hour on one of them. For that reason a pair of socks were chosen to have at least one finished object for March. The test knit cardigan Abu Dhabi Soft by Meiju was my February finished work. It is now published and the pattern can be purchased here.
My slow progress was partially due to hosting guests for about four weeks over three months, partially because I took classes throughout the month of March. My motivation to craft is highest when I have few distractions and can spend longer patches of time on knitting. It seems to increase my productivity…
Some of my works in Progress (or WIPs) are old acquaintances: The crochet poncho grows by about 5 flowers each week when I go to the local Wednesday crochet group. At that speed it will take me another 20 weeks or more to finish it. So, you will be able to watch the growth in very slow motion. The other “seemingly endless” WIP is my pinwheel blanket. 10 squares have been finished and in the current colourway I have enough yarn for another 2 squares. Once the last two squares will be knit I want to decide if a. to stop and leave it at lap blanket size (about 100 x 120 cm), b. knit more squares in another colourway to add or c. Buy some white yarn and knit a border around each square and then knit them all together into a blanket of about 160 x 170 cm. I found an example for a mitered-square blanket with borders here.
Even though this should be plenty to keep me entertained, I crave knitting with my hand-spun 3-ply in sweater quantity I finished spinning in 2016 and had wound into cakes “ready-to-go” in January. While I was knitting on the Abu Dhabi Soft cardigan and mentioning in my blog a little while ago that I was trying to remember a Elizabeth Zimmerman pattern for my hand-spun yarn a dear friend of mine found the pattern and sent a copy. There was no time to be wasted and it was started around March 19th. I am really happy about the progress as it grows rather quickly on the 4.5 mm needles. My latest Project is a hat for charity to reduce some leftover yarn. Additionally, it gave me the opportunity to try one of Barbara Walker’s mosaic patterns from her book “Charted knitting designs”- Four armed square with arms bent eight times. I am enamored by the intricate look, especially in garter stitch and the easy knitting.
Spinning has been taking a fair amount of my time as well. In January – before I agreed to the test knit – I signed up for the “spin the bin” challenge in the Completely Arbitrary and Twisted (CTA) spinning group on Ravelry. I learned about this challenge from Rachel at Welford purls. One declares at the beginning of the year which braids and fibres one wants to spin, a minimum of 24 ounces = 720 gm. That does not sound like much to some spinners, but it will take me about three and a half months to spin my first 12 ounces of 28 declared. It is basically a challenge to use as much fibre out of my stash as I can to free up some space. This created the goal to knit more from my hand-spun yarn this year and reduce buying yarn to a minimum. Easy, as long as I stay out of yarn stores while travelling..:)
When I read the winter issue of Spin-off magazine in December and January I found an article ” A sweater from my backyard” about sourcing local fibre and working with dye colours available to us in our surroundings. This article had reinforced the idea to find local farmers of sheep or camels here in Abu Dhabi and procure some of their fibres. This has been proven utterly difficult since access to agriculture seems to be for the local people only. Lacking Arabic has not helped neither, as the few crafts people I meet at fairs are often elderly and were educated before English was taught at school. But without looking two opportunities of unexpected fibre have entered my sphere of spinning. The first one is cotton: one of my friends noticed an ugly tree/shrub in her garden and asked the gardener to remove it when he chided her for wanting to kill a valuable tree. With not much watering the tree started to grow cotton flowers that could be harvested. Now, I am in the possession of 15 gm of natural white (and organic) cotton fibre, hand-picked and cleaned from the seeds that I am spinning with my turtle lace-spindle into thin singles. I hope to create about 30-50 meters of a three-ply yarn to return to the cotton-owner to create a memento of her time in Abu Dhabi.
The second local fibre too explore will be described in my next crafting blog. Until then – thank you for following my adventures in the Middle East.
Happy crafting! Maike
beecosydesign 
Wow — I didn’t know that a cotton bush would grow perpetually. Never occurred to me. Nice work.
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Hi, Anna! Wow! You were busy reading a few blog posts at once and commenting on them all.😀 Thank you! Yes, we have been busy traveling and I am busy with crafting. Often so much that I fall quite behind with my blog. Yesterday, we had an WiFi-outage at home. What a weird feeling to have no internet or ability to communicate with WhatsApp with my circle of friends here. Luckily, SMS or texting still works. Too dependant on electronics, I suppose. I will be visiting Vancouver the last week of May, but won’t make it to the next WCKG meeting. Hopefully, it can be organised for my next visit on early November. How are you? Did you participate in the yarn crawl? Take care and thank you, for being interested in my life. Keep commenting! I love it! Cheers, Maike
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