Hexapuff Madness!

First, and for the record, I vastly prefer hexapuff over hexipuff. Hexagon, hexapod, hexadecimal, therefore hexapuff. Now that we've gotten that out of the way.

You know about the Beekeeper's Quilt, right? It's positively sweeping the (knitting) nation! I fell prey to it immediately because it's the nicest looking scrap project I've ever seen. Now I'm kicking myself that I've given so many sock scraps away over the years. Luckily I still had a goodly bag full of them.

I like this project for a bunch of reasons.

1) Puffy hexagons are cute.
2) I like that the puffy hexagons are knit in the round, no seaming.
3) Furthermore, no seaming the entire thing; it's actually tied together.
4) Since it's pieced at the end, you can make lots of puffs and then decide how the layout/color scheme will work.
5) There are lots of creative ways to puff.

Here are some of the ways I've come up with so far on how to puff, other than with sock scraps:

Handspun. This doesn't really even count as a creative way to puff per se as it's pretty obvious, but I can just sample up any little bit of fiber into a fingering weight, and make puffs from that. Lovely.



Silk Hankies. Knitting from silk hankies was certainly made popular by the Yarn Harlot, and recently I saw a very nice and informative blog post by Maia explaining the process in detail. I happen to have a bunch of silk hankies sitting around, some of which I dyed myself when Jenny Jo and I had a dyeing day at her place. I tried puffing with bamboo DPNs, and that was not happening--imagine me shaking my fist at the heavens and yelling "FRICTION!"-- so I switched over to my beloved ChiaoGoo RED lace needles, and it worked. It's a little fiddly magic looping them, because even though the join on the ChiaoGoo needles is miraculous, the silk has issues. Ideally these would be knit on very slick DPNs, which I don't think I own. It might be an excuse to invest in a set of Signature DPNs, but I'm not that crazy...yet.



Succumbing to my inability to darn.

Delusional me: La, la la, I have every intention of mending these socks. I've kept them for years. I've moved them across the country.

Tough love me: I've knit over two dozens socks while they've languished, injured. It's time to come to grips with myself. They are not going to get darned. There's still plenty of good yarn in those socks: to the puff pile!



The puff pile, by the way, she grows and grows.

Loop Spin-in Recap

Do you like rows of things organized by color?



I know I do.

How about bags of colorful things next to some cool-looking machinery?



This is what the loop studio is like. It's one of my new favorite places on Earth. I was there Saturday with a friend attending a spin-in. A few goodies came home with me.



Cleo thought about taking a fiber baby home.



This studio is in the Hudson Valley, in an old industrial complex converted into an arts center. Here's the stream running between some of the buildings.



You may have seen the article in the Times this weekend about the so-called Brooklynization of the Hudson Valley. While it's a tragedy that industrial jobs have gone away (probably) never to return, it's pretty great that these old buildings can be repurposed. I dream of being able to work in such a cool space. I'd spend my first few weeks organizing stuff by color.