Felting and spicy maple pecans

Most of my work projects wrapped up in the last two weeks, so I've been head-down on that lately.

I've found some time to continue working on the felting projects, though I'm struggling with the knitting side of the experiment. Until I can get a consistent loose stitch knitting, I don't think I'll be able to create a fabric suitable for felting, so that's a work in progress.

I've made these pecans three times this week. The first two times I used honey instead, and not quite enough spice. Still good! This last one is deliciously maple-flavored. My oven heats unevenly, so I've burned a good number of them each time, which is disappointing.

Felting prep

I've continued to work on the afghan off and on, but since I keep having obsessional felt-project thoughts, I switched to some experimenting in that area today.

I've felted a couple of crochet pieces before with an eye to making a padded drum bag, but I haven't been entirely satisfied with them. Perhaps crochet stitches aren't as conducive to felting as knitting stitches in general, or perhaps it was that I was using double crochet stitches rather than the half-double which is said to be the best crochet stitch for felting. Or maybe I crochet too tightly.

In this red felted crocheted circle, which I do use to pad drum heads but have yet to incorporate into any fitted cover, the stitches are still too well defined for me to be happy. Bucky likes it, though. He's a little weird about wool. I've often wondered how he'd react to a whole sheep.



I poked around in my stash and found this nice harvest-berry colored ball of thick and thin fiber. It crunched like wool when I squeezed it, and the fibers seemed loose, so I thought it might work for a felting trial. When I put a snippet through the burn test, it smelled like wool and the flame went out immediately, but then left a hard black lump. I thought maybe it was a wool acrylic blend, but when I pressed on the lump, it shattered into powder all over my desktop and working papers. Ugh. Well, at least that question is answered - it's wool.

I thought I'd knit a big swatch instead of crocheting it, and see how that turned out. Ha ha! That was optimistic. It's been more than a year since I practiced knitting. By row 2 my stitches were too tight to get the needle tip in. Riiip!

One crochet swatch with a more-or-less N sized hook (about #14 needle), and one knit swatch with #10 needles (about J hook). I think the crochet swatch will still turn out to be thicker when felted due to the thicker stitch, despite the larger hook size.
pix pending

Cool weather crochet

What with the cooling weather, I've been working on crochet the past few days. I don't have any big project I want to push to complete right now - lots of ideas percolating, mostly about small felting projects, but nothing lighting a big fire - so I'm plugging away on a couple of works-in-progress.

I have an afghan I've been poking along with off and on for most of a year in a nice set of muted colors in my favorite acrylic. I do prefer wool, but acrylic is just more practical for afghans.

Here's a view in progress - and also a link to my notes on Ravelry. Now that it's pulling together, it reminds me of Neapolitan ice cream. Which wasn't quite what I was going for, but oh, well. I like it anyway.

I'd like to get it finished and move on at this point. I have a lot of wool stashed in various lovely colorways and have been wanting to felt them. I had some ideas about a felted sculpture, but I don't have any of the colors I wanted for that, so in the meantime I might as well felty up some other little things. Gifting time is here!