Check out the DFW Fiber Fest

If you live in or near Texas, you’ll probably want to check out and hopefully make plans to attend the DFW Fiber Fest, which takes place Sept. 14-17 at the Irving Convention Center.

In addition to the vendor hall with more than 100 vendors, there will be morning and afternoon on the Thursday and Friday of the festival, as well as morning, afternoon and evening classes on Saturday, and classes on Sunday morning. Some of the classes are all day deep dives into projects or techniques.

Jean over at Bead Biz sent me information about the festival, so I wanted to mention her classes in particular (she’s also a vendor). She’s teaching different ways to add beads to a cast on and bind off (two different classes; that’s her shawl above) as well as wisdom on starting a craft business.

In addition you’ll find a ton of other classes such as how to cross stitch on knitting, different ways to shape the top of a hat, spinning Shetland wool, felted mermaids, punch needle bees, loom knitting, double knitting, ergonomics and more.

As part of the event there’s a makealong for both knitters and crocheters, who can get a special discount on a shawl pattern to make prior to the event.

I know a lot of these vendors and teachers have lost money because of Stitches shutting down, so if you’re in the area it would be great to show them some support. (The beginning of that story, where Stitches reported it was closing, is here, with more details here if you’re not caught up on it.)

Have you ever been to DFW Fiber Fest? It sounds like a great event but I’d love to hear about your experience if you have gone or are planning to attend this year.

[Photo: Jean Elizabeth Glass.]

For the past few years I’ve taken part in a Christmas in July blog hop that encourages people to get a jump on their making for holiday gifts.

I love to use yarn I already have for these projects in the hope that people will consider what they already have that they can use to make projects for themselves or to give as gifts.

This year it was a couple of knit baskets made using partial balls of yarn left in my stash from other projects.

They use the same basic pattern but the first one is made with two colors of bulky yarn, and the second used two strands of worsted weight yarn held together, which made the gauge about the same, but I cast on fewer stitches to make a smaller version.

The bottom of the basket is square, though you can make them rectangular if you’d rather. Then I just knit up the sides in rounds until I was about to run out of yarn. This gave both baskets rather short sides — maybe more like a tray than a basket — but you can keep knitting as long as you like to make the sides of your basket as tall as you want.

They’re worked in seed stitch, which keeps the edges from curling and adds a nice texture to the baskets.

Of course this also allows you to use even more odd balls from your stash. I’d love to make a big one someday combining lots of different yarn. I mean, I’d probably use it to store more yarn, but that’s a fine thing to do.

As it is, these little trays are great for sitting on your desk or bedside table to hold little things that always seem to appear there. I like to use one to hold the supplies for whatever project I’m working on, things like little scissors, my tape measure, a crochet hook, etc.

And they would make good gifts on their own or as a container to hold some other goodies if you like.

You can find the free pattern for these stash busting baskets over at Our Daily Craft.

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