Let me introduce...

...one of my favourite online comics and a new art yarn that was inspired by it.
I am talking about the Unspeakable Vault (of Doom), where you can find very cute strips about Cthulhu and the other Great Old Ones. I have always liked the Shoggies, all wobbly and with many eyes, and have wanted to spin a yarn inspired by them for quite a while. Well, I finally managed:





I have used fluffy, squashy Blue Faced Leicester wool which I have died with easter egg food colours. I plied it with glow in the dark sewing thread, strung with eyed made from glow in the dark polymer clay, and made lots of coils. I didn't manage to take a better glow in the dark photo, here you can only see the eyes, but the plying thread glows, too.


My friend and shop partner suggested for me to knit a brain-eating hat ;-) But since pink is really not my colour, however cool the yarn, I'll put it into our shop soon.

Curious about more Shoggy strips? Shoggies and Cthulhu, Bowling, Shoggies go Battlestar Galactica. There are more, of course - just browse The Vault! ;-)

Halloween Stitchmarkers

They're monstrously large, monstrously cute and, of course, monstrously halloweeny ;-) They fit needles up to 10 mm, so they're great helpers for knitting art yarns.

They are also a custom product, so you won't find them in the shop (unless many people beg us to make more ;-))

Ocean of Zombies - Creepy? Fun!

As I mentioned a short while ago, I was quite tempted to spin a very different ocean yarn, wich I did. It's for a monthly challenge on our new (German) community over at www.spinnkult.de, as well as the second yarn I'm also about to show you. But first, let me introduce the zombies ;-)

I do like very textured yarns, as I've probably also mentioned before. For this one, I used a wonderful, hand dyed merino/bamboo blend, some glow in the dark thread, some snail-shells, mother of pearls discs, angelina and, of course, the zombie heads made from glow in the dark polymer clay. It's 146 m, 138 g and about 10 wpi.

Here's a glow photo, but since I've taken it with my mobile you can't really see how nice the thread glows, only the zombie heads:

(More pictures on my flickr page)

And then, there's a very nice (and not so strange) corespun yarn, also with snail-shells and angelina, made from kid mohair fibre (also hand dyed) that has been spun around some glow in the dark sewing thread:

I don't have a glow photo, though, since my mobile is not good enough for that. I really need my shop partner (or my fiancé) to show me how to use the real camera with glow in the dark stuff. My last attempts were not as good as they could have been, though passable ;-)

In eigener Sache - a personal note

Wir sind jung, technophil, merkwürdig; und spinnwütig! Darum spinnen wir Artyarns, und darum lieben wir es, uns in Onlinecommunitys rumzutreiben. Und bis heute haben wir ein Deutsches Spinnforum mit einem Artyarn-Schwerpunkt schmerzlich vermisst.
Darum haben wir uns gedacht: Es muss noch mehr Menschen geben, die ebenso modern, bunt und spaßbetont spinnen wie wir! Gemeinsam mit ihnen - mit euch! - wollen wir eine Spinncommunity gründen, die zu uns allen passt: Revolutionär, ein bisschen chaotisch, offen und natürlich schrecklich kreativ! ;-) Sich gegenseitig ehrlich und frei austauschen, sich gegenseitig inspirieren, kritisieren, gemeinsam aktiv sein!

Gemeinsam mit euch allen wollen wir also das junge, moderne Spinnforum ins Leben rufen, das uns fehlt! Wir vernetzen uns, wir sind aktiv, planen Aktivitäten gemeinsam: seien es öffentliche Spinnaktionen oder Strick-, Häkel- oder anders-handarbeitige Aktionen, seinen es kleine oder große Tauschaktionen, sei es Guerilla-Stricken oder Graffiti-Häkeln, sei es in einer lokalen Gruppe oder zur gleichen Zeit an unterschiedlichen Orten!
Schließ' dich uns an! Auf www.spinnkult.de findest du unsere Community. Mit eurer Hilfe wollen wir gemeinsam eine Plattform schaffen, auf der wir alle uns wohl fühlen! Noch ist nicht alles fertig und perfekt, so können wir gemeinsam gestalten!

Wir freuen uns auf die Zusammenarbeit! :-)

(We have launched an art yarn forum - in German, which is why this posting is in German as well.)

Has it really been a year??

Not quite, but nearly.
I am talking about Halloween preparations.
Since we want our customers to be able to knit something from our (planned) Halloween yarns before the actual event, we have to start spinning Halloween yarns again. What did I say - have to? WANT to is more like it, we just love doing it, of course ;-)
So I went and made some new weird beads, remembering all the fun I had last year.
All the white/light parts glow in the dark.

The unidentifiable beads in the bottom row are supposed to be eyes for a special project - but I'll tell you more about that when there's more to see.

I also dug out my easter egg colours, which are more easily to use (and require less time, I can do that along the way, using the microwave) than acid dyes and dyed some kid mohair and some merino/bamboo blend.

The kid mohair will become another fluffy glow in the dark yarn and the blend is for another ocean-themed yarn - though I have to admit I am quite tempted to use the blend in combination with the white heads in the picture above to make an unusual halloween yarn, such as a drowned corpse or something similar vivid ;-) (Would fit into the ocean theme nicely, don't you think? *g*)

A Pirate's Treasure

I needed a small and quick project the other day and came up with a simple little pouch for jewelry or other small items.
It's really not a big deal, but I do love what I added to make it more interesting ;-)
That's a tiny skull of real bone, a facetted red glass bead and a blue variety of (synthetic) goldstone I don't know the english name for.

My next pouch will feature a more interesting fibre mix and some glittering angelina - I've already carded some batts and started spindling ;-)

Stoned ;-)

I know, I know - couldn't resist ;-)

I've finally managed to make key chain rings from the beach stones I ordered a while ago. They have been finished for about a week or two, but since some of them were intended as gifts, I couldn't write about them earlier. Now I have given most of them away to dear friends I meet once or twice a year and I am finally able to post some pictures.

I had decided to put my studies to good use and create egyptian "magic" pendants to use as key rings or bag clingers. I looked for some hieroglyphic words like "magic", "seeress", "might" (and many others) and painted them onto the stones. I am quite satisfied with the outcome :-)



I wanted my friends to know what word they had chosen, but only after choosing a pendant, so I wrote the hieroglyphs, the transcription and the German meaning on narrow strips of parchment and rolled them around the wiry bits. This way, everyone was able to choose from looks and then get a nice surprise ;-)


There are a few left (I had ordered more stones than I needed, greedy me ;-)) and I am currently thinking about listing them in our InnerTwilight shop. Or I might keep them to have a small gift handy when I need it :-)