I really felt the craft love.

First of all, sorry for the slight extra delay on this post. I thought I published it yesterday, whereas I actually just saved it as a draft. Silly me.
Everyone have a happy holidays? Or should I say, are you having nice holidays - if you're lucky, you're still on them. Happily enough, I am lucky, in more ways than one. Not only do I have holidays until Wednesday, but I got home safe and sound despite the snow, even if it did take some in the region of 8 hours. The snow in Donegal was very heavy indeed, which, though rendering the landscape around my house beautiful, played havoc with my mum's oven and water supply. I really enjoyed my week at home, spending the time at my mum's house watching tv, playing with the cat and knitting, and the time in at my best friend Ruth's house watching tv, playing Bananagrams and knitting. So what have I got to show for myself? Not just one pair of socks, but one and a half!

These were knit with some Donegal Yarn wool I bought at Feanór craft shop here in Galway. It knits up really fast on 4.50mm needles, which is why I was able to fly through these socks. My cold feet were extremely grateful for.

While unpacking my bags I came along the spare inches of yarn I'd cut after weaving the ends off the first pair, when suddenly I rembered I had a dryfelting needle!

 A dryfelting needle looks like just a little bit of pointed metal, but it actually has teeny tiny barbs along it's sides (much like, it may or may not interest you to know, a cat's penis. Hey, it's my blog, I can write what I like). These barbs are pointed such that as the needle travels down through the fibre, it will grab any fibres it encounters along the way and pull them down with it, but as it is pulled out of the material, the fibres will slide off them. So as you jab the needle repeatedly, the fibres get more and more tangled together and will eventually be fused together. This technique can be used in both 2-d and 3-D works of craft, some of which can be seen on Feanór's etsy shop. I'm not up to anything quite so ambitious, but I was happy enough to turn a scrap of fabric and spare wool into a cute little anchor.

If you look at the back of the material, you can see what I mean about the fibres getting dragged into the other fibre. This it what makes the fibres stick together.

This is a handy technique for using up spare lengths of yarn - as you can see form above, you really don't need much at all.

Enjoy the rest of your holidays everyone.