We’ve been watching a lot of baseball the last two weeks as the Cardinals fought their way into the World Series. So I’ve been crocheting a lot in front of the TV, making fingerless gloves for special orders. This is just one pair I’ve finished. More photos coming soon.

On the jumbo hook front, I’ve ordered two different sizes of handcrafted wooden hooks and should have those in a few weeks. Can’t wait!

This is the ribbed slouch hat pattern I tried with the Alpaca/silk blend I received at Farm Day. The yarn was the perfect combo of soft and warm.

Add great people to amazing fall weather and my favorite activity and you have the ingredients for a wonderful day! My daughter, step mom and I had sooo much fun at Mariposa/Big River Farms‘ Alpaca Farm Day.

This is the first year that fiber artists were invited to demonstrate knitting, crocheting, and spinning. Our hosts generously gave us yarn and roving to use during the day.

I also took some of my FP and sold two pairs of fingerless gloves! Guess I need to get to work on more of those!

This is Meredith Rau and Annie Fuller spinning away. Meredith works at the Daniel Boone home demonstrating 1800′s spinnning. What a great job! Annie was patiently teaching one of the volunteer boys to spin and I realized it’s harder than it looks!

We made friends with Yana, who knits beautiful hats from crazy complicated patterns. She was using five double pointed needles making this hat. She is a Londoner, living here in St. Louis and works as a research specialist. Yana started a knitting community on Google+

Sue has been spinning for more than 15 years. She brought her Saxony wheel, that was hand made. She spun two spools of alpaca blend roving into a two ply yarn and gave it to me at the end of the day. She is so generous! I learned so much about spinning over the course of the day as she was talking to all the visitors who came by.

There are some FP I made with alpaca and I will post those coming soon!

Now that the weather has turned cooler, I’m firing up my size S crochet hook and designing double chunky projects for fall. These pillows were crocheted with two strands of super chunky yarn – thus double chunky. I made a simple envelope out of fleece and sewed them to the crocheted tops. I already have Christmas present requests so more of these are in the works.

In other news, I’m going to an alpaca farm to demonstrate crochet at the end of the month and am pretty excited about it. There are also going to be knitters and spinners there so I’m going to find out about getting some double chunky yarn hand spun. Two strands of super chunky crocheted together don’t look the same as one double chunky strand. There isn’t really even a term for what I want, which is like two #6 strands thick.

And, I’ve been reading “Rules of Civility” by Amor Towles for our little book club. It was quite a good read with interesting characters and insights into human nature. Even though Towles is a man, he writes the main character’s voice (a woman) very convincingly, because he doesn’t try to write as a woman, he writes as a person. There is no pat happy ending but everything is wrapped together and comes full circle in the end. Quite satisfying.

There are so many great ideas and ways to customize the links to your SM homes that can really “seal the deal” with your blog/website design. Check out these great icon sets:

Little Box of Ideas Lego Icons – Don’t you love the Lego icons?

eHow Social Media Icons – This clever banner uses an image to house the SM icons. There are different banners for different sections of the eHow site, too.

Eli Rose Smicons - This site is “where social media ideas come to grow.” Great use of imagery!

Here are my social media icons, before and after. I decided just to make a simple color change to match my new design’s palette and avoid too much clutter by using balls of yarn since those are already used in the header.

Ready to whip up some of your own social media icons? Here’s a handy Photoshop tutorial by Benjamin Reed at Nouveller.