A Finished Knitting Project and Booth Upgrades

I have a finished knitting project and a few booth upgrades to show you today. We have done some home upgrades too but I will save that for another post.

Knitting

I will get straight to the knitting content first. I finished the Summershine Top in Organic Cotton Sport yarn.

I am very happy with the look and feel of this top. I am less pleased with the fit on myself. That is my fault, though, due to the gauge being a bit tighter than it should have been for the size I made. I knit a sleeve first as a swatch on size US 4 needles and it seemed fine at 5.5 stitches per inch. In the final garment, however, the overall gauge is closer to 6 stitches per inch. The finished garment size is around 39.5″ rather than the 41″ I wanted. I can fit into it but it doesn’t have the positive ease I was going for. It is fine as it is as a booth sample but I may go up a size when I make another for myself out of the Patons Linen.

The only knitting that I have on my needles now is the Veritas Shawl. It hasn’t changed from my last post about it since I devoted all my knitting energy to the sweater. I will probably get back to the shawl. I would like to get it finished before the Westknits MKAL next month. I’m not 100% sure I am participating but I have purchased the pattern.

Booth Upgrades

Since my previous blog post, I have been to the Wisconsin Sheep and Wool. It was absolutely fabulous as always. The crafters turned out in droves and the weather was cool and fall like.

After returning from Wisconsin. I had another ten day break. I needed to do a bit of restock dyeing since this was the last opportunity to do so and we were getting low on some colors. mostly in DK. The rest of the fall is pretty much back to back festivals until the first of November. So, I took a couple of days to get that taken care of.

After that was done, we still had most of the week left. We knew some of the booth fixtures were looking rather road weary. It seemed like a good time to do something about that. All of these were made in 2007/2008 and have seen A LOT of use/abuse.

We started with the checkout stand. It was in the worst shape. We decided it needed completely scrapped and rebuilt. It had already been repaired and painter multiple times and it was tired, LOL. I am so excited and pleased with the new one. We kept the top size the same but we expanded the base and added extra storage space for my bags and other stuff I like to keep in there. I love the color I picked to compliment the logo. It also contrasts the cherry table top nicely!

Next we got to work on the Yarn Swift display table. It was in need of repairs to the support legs and the top needed sanding and a re-fresh of linseed oil and wax. We decided to paint the support legs to match the check out stand. The table top looks almost like new!

The last item we gave a new life was the shelf unit where I display lots of different tools and accessories. The large dowel type shelf supports needed some of the threads repaired but they were otherwise still okay. Jerry made these from Mahogany and would have taken awhile to re-make. We got them back in working order with a few minor repairs. The shelf boards really needed completely replaced. We opted to try using some solid pine to replace the oak plywood in the old ones. These new ones may not make it 17 years but they are lighter. We painted them in the Sea Turtle green too. I look how they look!

Festival

I am in Yellow Springs, Ohio this weekend for the Wool Gathering Festival at Young’s Jersey Dairy. The weather for the weekend looks like it will be on the warm side but since we are in tents I guess that’s better than wet. Hopefully, no rain until after the load up on Sunday.

I am only going to be home for a day and a half. I will fill you in on the house upgrades while I am there next week. See you soon!