Knot Knecessarily Known Knitting

I've continued my march through the embroidery stash. This set of projects did not come from my mother. Rather, I found these in my own stash a couple years ago. I do not remember how they were acquired. Had I bought them? Did my mother gift them to me? Did they come from the stash of one of my mother's friends who had died? I do not recall. Again, for a reason I do not recall, I decided to work on these in maybe 2021 or 2022? There were three of them in my stash. As I got close to finishing the third one in late 2022, I noticed the kit numbers were almost sequential. That sent me on an internet search to see if there were other kits. There were! Some of them were holiday-themed, some not. Not all of them appealed to me, but I did like the snowman, so I bought it for a modest fee. I remember starting the snowman and thinking, "I won't have it done for 2022, but I'll have these finished for Yule 2023." Well, that was before my moth...

I've been in a recent period of yo-yo crafting. By that, I mean I move forward on something, only to discover I need to move backward to move forward again. While this is part of knitting, some days I'd like success to stick! To that end, I am creeping up on completion of a very long spinning project. This project goes all the way back to my first spinning fleece purchase at the Knit and Crochet Fall Show September 2011 in Charlotte, North Carolina. I made the mistake(?) of touching a particularly soft black alpaca fleece. In autumn of 2020, I decided this fleece had aged long enough in stash. It was time to spin it. The slowness in getting around to spinning this fleece came from multiple directions. Partly, the fleece was "precious." I wanted to do it justice. Part of it was the material. Spinning alpaca is not the same as spinning wool. I've had a surprisingly difficult time finding resources about how to spin alpaca. Even PLY Magazine , my first-choice source...