Began: Sometime in May
I cast on for the tuxedo top that I've been thinking about making for over a year. I'm using elann bamboo and it's very soft and pretty but very splitty, annoyingly so. Also, I've restarted several times as my gauge swatch completely lied to me. I think it's going to be a somewhat boring knit; it's almost entirely reverse stockinette on size 3 needles. 
Today was dye day for my spinning class. I took my pathetic-looking, bumpy little mini-skeins of yarn to class and we used 3 different mordants and 4 natural dyes to get 12 different shades of yarn. They are rather muted-looking, but kind of cool. They go together nicely, so I think I will probably try to knit something in fair isle out of a bunch of them (the skeins are way too small to do anything in a single color.) I think, if I continue spinning, I will probably experiment with synthetic dyes rather than natural ones, just because I tend to like brighter colors. Here are two of my undyed skeins....one is a single and one is a plyed yarn.
The single is my most recent work so it's slightly more even and less bumpy than all the rest.
Began: December 28, 2008
I looked at so many quilts online to find inspiration for this quilt, but I pretty much worked out the plan for it myself. I used various pictures as templates for the appliqued animals--I think the only one that I found from a quilt pattern was the giraffe, from Oh Fransson!, and I modified that one, too. I started by creating different animal blocks, knowing that I wanted to have 9 blocks with a different animal in each one, and white sashing in between. Several quilts from Crazy Mom Quilts inspired me to do the blocks this way, alternating borders of white with the prints. She also inspired me to do a pieced back, although I came up with the design for it myself. I had to have that extra strip of small patches of prints on the back (they were 4.5" squares) because the back just wasn't going to be quite wide enough without it.
Making my pieced binding was a snap (I followed instructions on a tutorial found on Crazy Mama Quilts) and attaching it to the quilt was also pretty easy, but it's taking me a LONG time to sew it up by hand. But I'm about 2/3 of the way done.
What a productive weekend I've had! Here's what I accomplished:
Isn't it sweet-looking? And here's a look at my yarn. It certainly looks homespun...but it's yarn, after all:
