I got a spinning wheel!

I haven't updated my blog in awhile, so here's a sock.

2009-11-01T08:32:00.000-08:00

I was beginning to think I'd never post on my blog again, but then a flurry of productivity hit me and I finished four knitting projects in a week. Newly inspired, my dormant need to show off rose up once again and screamed LOOK AT ME.

Here are some socks I started knitting for Doug over a year ago, which I finally buckled down and completed:

This pattern was cobbled together from Charlene Schurch's "More Sensational Knitted Socks", using Patons Kroy sock yarn. I enjoyed knitting them, so I'm not sure why I procrastinated finishing them for so long.

Probably because in the earlier part of this year I became obsessed with spinning and knitting sweaters for ME. We all know how much I like ME.

The first is the Diminishing Rib Cardigan, pattern by Andrea Pomerantz featured in IK Spring 2009:

This is that merino-and-silk fiber I spun this spring and fought with a bit to get it the right weight. Now that I know better how to handle this stuff, I kind of want more to experiment with.

The second is the Shalom Cardigan (Windy calls it my "shawlter" because it is both shawl and sweater) by Meghan McFarlane. I dyed and spun this stuff intending to make something for Doug, but oh, look, ME. I think this is my favorite thing I've ever knitted. And it was FUN to knit; I did the whole thing in two weeks.

For the record, Doug likes it, too, and has entirely forgotten about his sweater.

Awake and Spinning

2009-08-23T08:35:00.001-07:00

I know, I know. Everyone who reads my blog (or USED to read it before I slacked off) is fed up with me for not posting pictures of my remodeled kitchen. And I was going to put the pictures up today. I really was.

But then I realized, if I WAIT, I'll continue to have a captive audience for my riveting, adventurous tales of YARN.

Somehow, with everything going on - all the death and destruction and remodeling and packing and moving and cleaning - I have managed to spin 700,000 skeins of yarn and knit two mostly finished sweaters. I think it's because of the new wheel. I am pretty sure it is a time machine.

Speaking of time machines, at some point I'm going to have to give up my car because it is 10 years old and sounds like an airplane taking off and I don't think Dug is ever going to fix the ceiling fabric that is now drooping down so low it will soon cover my eyes when I'm driving. (Yes, I KNOW I could figure out how to fix it myself - that's not the point. I'm lazy, people.) Anyway, my car had this really nice feature of going back in time during transit, so that if a party started at 7:00, I could leave my house at 8:00 and get there at 6:30, making everyone feel super awkward and concerned for my social skills. When I first got the car, I named it Penelope (not sure why), but now with all the noises and the time travel and it being blue, I've rechristened it the ReTardis.

Eh? Eh? Get it? Sigh.

Oh yeah, yarn. I've spun and knitted so much crap, I didn't know where to start with the show-and-tell, so I've begun with the first stuff I spun on the Majacraft when I got it. This is the extremely soft and snuggly chocolate alpaca I bought on the trip to Illinois last year, when we stopped at Apples and Alpacas in Mexico, MO. That was such a fun visit. I can't believe almost a year has passed since then.

I love how this yarn turned out. I managed, miraculously, to learn how to do the long draw spinning technique (drawing back with the drafting hand and not smoothing down the fibers as you go - allows for a softer texture) and didn't overtwist it, so it turned out very silky with a nice fuzzy halo.

I DON'T love how I had to take 3000 pictures of it to get only ONE which is remotely the correct color - it's the right color on the bobbin shots above, but somehow it defies photographing once plied. Also, it is not blindingly reflective in real life - indeed, it is not shiny at all. Not sure where that's coming from. Cousin Mark? I'm going to need you to drive to Kansas to photograph my yarn properly. 'Kay? Thanks.

I also don't know what to do with it. I got 2.5 skeins of it...maybe 400 yards or so? Any ideas?

Remodelling & Whining Update

2009-06-20T11:24:00.000-07:00

All of you - fine, both of you - who read my blog might well assume that, after two months with no posts, I'd decided to abandon the whole thing. No, no, I've just been so very busy. (Which is a nice way of saying I've been wallowing in despair and ignoring my own very wise advice to myself which was something along the lines of, "NO wallowing. Particularly in despair.")

I thought I'd more or less avoided the obnoxious grief thing, but turns out I only postponed it. Then it hunted me down and beat the holy living crap out of me. It didn't get me right away because I was cleaning out my mom's house and I had the hard work/focus on mom's stuff to exorcise my grief with. When the contractors started, however, I had to wait until they were done to resume my work over there...then two months went by and I can't remember a damn thing about those two months. It's like I was sleepwalking. Anyway, I snapped out of it, cried for two weeks, and now I'm okay and my (current) house is REALLY dirty because nobody cleaned it while I was sleepwalking.

I feel like...er, that character in that series of books everyone is reading that I will not admit to having read (twice), when, in the second book she is so upset that she just goes numb for a long time. Then, of course, when she snaps out of it the ouchiness is much worse than if she'd just faced it and run off with Jacob in the first place. I mean, uh...nevermind. Let's move along.

OH LOOK, my bathroom is done. Let us review the before pictures:

As you can see, the old bathroom was MARVELOUS, but there were a few things wrong with it. Some of those things you can't see in the photos, but I will not describe them here, in case any of you might be eating.

Here's a few snapshots of what it looks like now:

In my opinion, the new bathroom is a bit of an improvement. In my next post, whenever I get around to that, I will show the new kitchen. And also maybe some yarn. (Apparently, while wallowing in despair, I went a little sweater crazy.)

RePly

2009-04-07T05:27:00.000-07:00

In the comments of my last post, Jennifer asked if, since we both intend to knit the "Diminishing Rib Cardigan," we're both going to spin the yarn for it, too. Well, sure!

As soon as I rescue the first two skeins of yarn I made.

I thought I was pretty slick, spinning my yarn and measuring it with my WPI tool. I was downright smug about it. Y'all know where this is going...

Naturally, after I plied and washed my yarn, it...bloomed. It fluffed up. Expanded. What was supposed to be an 8-wraps-per-inch yarn became a 4-wpi-yarn. Which mean not only was the yarn totally wrong for its intended purpose, but I wouldn't have enough yardage anyway. Plus, I just didn't like it at that thickness, so plying it all and use it for a different project wasn't appealing, either.

I went ahead and made a skein from the same singles, except this time a 2-ply. OF COURSE it was perfect. Just what I wanted. The thickness, the color, the character. Arrrrgggh. I consulted the website to see if I could buy more fiber and dye and perhaps recreate my results. They were out of stock on the lovely silk merino blend. More arrrrrrrgggh. Then I looked at my two hideous 3-ply skeins and lamented wasting such gorgeous fiber. Arrrrggggh, again.

Then I realized...why don't I just unply it? Oh. Yeah.

So, last night I unspun the one 3ply skein back onto a bobbin, I put one of the three plies on my ball winder and the other two on my skeiner and made Dug help me manage it as I took the yarn apart. It was a time-consuming pain in the booty because we had to stop and untwist the bobbin and undo snarls...but it worked!

I just have to cross my fingers that it still looks right once I re-ply and wash it. I want my green sweater, people.

Babble

2009-03-30T06:21:00.000-07:00

With the Other House being worked on by contractors, we're taking a little break from all the sorting and cleaning, which is finally giving me some time for Fiber Therapy. I don't have any pictures to show you, because if I stopped to take pictures of stuff, I wouldn't be spinning.

I freaking LOVE my new wheel.

One thing it affords me is more efficiency. I'm a much faster drafter now than when I first started, and I'm discovering that, with the Rose, I don't have to slow down to match the pace of my wheel. Over the weekend I finished spinning and then plied 3 monster skeins of chocolate brown alpaca AND spun a full (giant, Majacraft-sized) bobbin-and-half of merino-silk for my next sweater. Days of work now takes hours.

OH YEAH, I've started spinning for the next sweater. I decided Malicious Salad would best be used for other projects, which left me still without a green sweater. The Diminishing Rib Cardigan by Andrea Pomerantz, featured on the cover of this spring's Interweave Knits, seemed like a good project for Spring knitting:
I'm doing something new and courageous with this project: I am attempting, with my spinning, to replicate the gauge of the yarn used by the designer. I ended up falling for this pattern because it happens that the yarn used (Savoy, by Stacy Charles) is a wool-silk blend, and I, coincidentally, had 2 lbs of wool-silk blend fiber waiting for my next project. I have dyed it green, but not solidly - I want the yarn to have a bit of a tweedy look when I'm done. (I also am spinning this yarn with a bit of "character" - not going for the ultimately smooth, milled look of the Savoy stuff - and I think this sweater design will really suit that look.)

The internet tells me that this yarn is an "Aran weight" and measures about 8 wraps-per-inch - that is, if I wrap this yarn around a ruler without pulling or squishing it too tightly, it's going to loop around the ruler approximately 8 times per inch. I started spinning the singles and then just 3-plied it back on itself, measured it, then adjusted the thickness of my singles until it worked out to 8 wpi. (Okay, fine, I didn't adjust and remeasure; I just eyeballed it and announced, "That looks about right!" and knocked on wood.) There is a wee bit of variation in my my singles, but that's alright; I'm just going for an approximation, not an exact science.

Maybe tonight I'll take pictures and then tomorrow I will go on and on about how much I like spinning this particular fiber. I could definitely see myself making more than one sweater with this stuff.

I got a(nother) spinning wheel!

2009-03-19T06:01:00.000-07:00

So, after months of research, I finally settled on the Majacraft Rose. I ordered it from a local shop, and they told me that Majacraft would ship the wheel directly to me from New Zealand. (I'm going to have to curb my sudden love of all things New Zealand; I fear that if I force Dug to watch one more Flight of the Conchords video, he's going to inflict bodily harm upon himself and others.) Anyway, so, shipping from New Zealand takes awhile, and I hadn't received any shipping notices, so I just figured I'd see my wheel in a month or so.

Somehow, though, I wasn't surprised when the mailman brought me a little package yesterday afternoon!
(I think you can click on this photo and it will open in a bigger screen, so that you don't have to squint so much to look at all these fascinating spinning wheel parts.)

I spent the evening assembling and then briefly getting to know my wheel. It's so different and slightly more complex than my Kiwi, so the learning curve is more than I expected. There was a little troubleshooting as I had a few no-that-part-goes-HERE moments and discovered that I needed to break in the bobbins a little because they're very tight on the flyer at first and don't want to spin freely. I also discovered that you want to adjust the whorl position so the groove on the whorl and the groove on the wheel you are using are directly lined up with one another. Somehow all of that figuring-it-out stuff was really fun.

I only did a wee bit of spinning, just using leftover scraps of wool as I tested everything out. This wheel has Scotch tension, but it's quite different from my Kiwi. It's actually easier to use because it's quite precise and you can see exactly where it needs to be before you start spinning - a little too loose, the bobbin doesn't brake; a little too tight, the drive wheel doesn't turn. Not much guesswork there!

The treadling on the Rose is so smooth. Dug noticed that it's a little harder to get started than the Kiwi. I did, too, but then the inertia makes it easy to keep on treadling, and there's no position where it wants to "stick"; it's very easy to control the wheel with the treadles alone, versus needing to sometimes...wait...

Dug, what do you mean "it's a little harder to get started than the Kiwi?" HOW WOULD YOU KNOW? You have been treadling my Kiwi! HAAAAA! Busted!!!

I knew Dug would succumb to the spinning wheel someday. I mean, I don't think he's going to take it up, but I can't deny that I am delighted at the evidence that he thinks it's just a little bit cool.

Anyway, I imagine Dug will be taking more photos of the wheel-in-use tonight so that I can blather on about it some more. One thing I do need assistance with is a NAME. I don't want to call my wheel "The Rose" all the time; it needs a proper name. What should I call it?

Bathroom: Before

2009-03-18T05:44:00.000-07:00

Joy! I have found some poor suckers to gut and replace everything in my bathroom, and they are starting tomorrow. I thought I'd celebrate by throwing up a little photo mosaic of "before" pictures. ("Throwing up" is definitely the right phrase, here.)
They are ripping the whole thing out, drywall included, replacing all the plumbing and wiring, and rebuilding the room from scratch. I hope to get some in-progress snapshots as they go!

I don't have any humor-laden commentary about this yet (I mean, really, the photos speak for themselves), but let us all hope that the contractors performing my bathroom transformation don't give me any REASON for humor laden-commentary. Okay, count of three: 1...2...3...begin hoping NOW. [unnnngggggghghhhhh]

Hoping feels a lot like constipation sometimes.

While I'm Cleaning

2009-03-16T05:47:00.000-07:00

I haven't been entirely unproductive with my spinning/knitting while cleaning out The House; just mostly unproductive.

Anyway, I started spinning Malicious Salad a while back but never posted any updates on it.

Look, Jocelyn - I put it on a SALAD plate. I am so clever!

The color is a little darker and richer in both real life and in this actual photograph (why is it so washed out when I post it?), but otherwise pretty accurate. I have about 3 full skeins of it ready to knit, and about 487 skeins left to spin. Originally, this was meant to be sweater yarn, but the way the colors are working out, it's going to be divvied up for smaller projects; Scott has already requested a hat, I'd like some socks out of it, and I think the skein with the bright yellow in it might make a lovely baby cardigan. The merino is so soft, it's really perfect for garments worn next to the skin. I also might throw some of it up on Etsy someday and see if I can make some money for my Remodel The Kitchen fund.Also, it's a #$#%#$# #$#%#$# to prep for spinning; it's not felty, but the roving is very thick, so I have to tear it into many strips and then loosen it all up, inch by inch, and there's so much of it. It's the same wool I dyed for Nuclear Pumpkin, which also was tedious to prep, but I could do less of it in one sitting. With Malicious Salad, I'm trying to keep the colors stripey, so that means I have to prep one whole length of the roving at once and it's reeeeeeeeally long.

Jennifer recently dyed a batch of shetland and she doesn't have to prep it at all; she just grabbed it off the drying rack (read: shower rod) and started spinning. Can you imagine how pissed I was, after all my dyeing experience and the ordeal of pre-drafting this merino wool, when the very first wool Jennifer dyed for spinning on her new wheel required NO PREP AT ALL? I blame the merino. I don't care if merino is supposed to be extra soft - next time I'm getting a slightly less spongy wool to work with.

Okay, yeah, so "next time" is four days ago, when I ordered a wool-silk blend. Okay, so the wool IS merino, but blended with the silk, it should be a whole different experience. Right?

I did it.

2009-03-04T12:01:00.000-08:00

Surprisingly, through all this housecleanerupping we've been doing, I haven't abandoned my spinning. In fact, it may be the only thing keeping me sane. (Well, okay, besides you people. Love!)

For a long time, I've been ready to move up to a wheel that's a little faster, a little more versatile, a little more sophisticated, a little more...BAD ASS. Yes, that's what I wanted. A BAD ASS wheel. I took awhile doing my homework, and after about a year of obsessive wheel research, I kept coming back to this one:
It's the Majacraft Rose. It comes with 4 bobbins, a lazy kate, TWO flyers (one regular and one for fine fibers, and two whorls with a huge variety of ratios (speeds) - you'd be hard pressed to find another wheel that comes with so much stuff. It's one of the most highly regarded wheels on the market and I TOTALLY JUST ORDERED IT.*

Mine mine mine mine. I feel so decadent, so rebellious, so GIDDY!

*Those of you who are Windy will be pleased to note that this means you can borrow my Kiwi.

Converts

2009-02-26T05:49:00.001-08:00

Damn me for not having my camera with me last night, damn me! Yesterday Windy IMmed me to plan our weekly Wednesday get-together, and she said the sweetest, most beautiful thing anyone has ever said to me. She said, "I'm ready to learn how to spin."

And did she! I know she feels as if she was struggling, but I'm so impressed at how quickly she got the hang of things: threading the orifice, fitting the yarn across the flyer hooks, treadling, drafting, managing the twist, joining new fiber. The real treat for me, as I was hiding around the corner pretending not to watch (instead of looming over her and making her nervous), was the look on her face as all of the motions she was learning popped into rhythm and suddenly she was making yarn.

Best day ever! It gets better though: the whole time she was spinning, Joe sat next to her, staring at the wheel with utter fascination, and when she was done, he even tried it for a minute. I might have TWO converts!

Life is good.

Delphinium Progress, With Better Photos

2009-02-17T15:06:00.000-08:00

When I'm not at work or soaking up all the attention my friends can give me or cleaning out my mom's house (okay, well, holding the trash bag while Scott cleans out my mom's house), I am sitting at home, sulking and feeling sorry for myself, and because I'm never one to pass up an opportunity, I'm taking advantage of my sulking time to knit away on this scarf:

I love working on this scarf. It will need a little blocking, but I'm going to have to take care not to block it too much because the stitches create a very three dimensional fabric and I don't want to flatten it out and lose that effect.

Again, my pictures just don't do this scarf justice, even when they are not blurry. Okay, look at the top two to get the idea of how the stitches and beads are put together, then look at the picture below to get an idea of the vibrant color:
See how it's a very rich, luscious pink, and then it has swirls of black-white-and-tan on top of it? A very nice color. Geezis, that window sill is filthy. Somebody get over here and dust. Yuck.

This project is special to me because my mom bought this fiber and dyed it herself when I first got my wheel. She was so excited about it. Naturally, once I started knitting something out of it she lost interest in it and I'm pretty sure she thought the beads were stupid. But we'll overlook that and just concentrate on the specialness, shall we?

We can also agree that the beads are SO not stupid. You can't tell from my deplorable photography, but these beads, which I bought at fusionbeads.com (see them here: http://www.fusionbeads.com/shop/product/27572/ ), are clear ruby pink but lined on the inside with silver to make them reflective, and they are gorgeous.

I'm really not a bead person OR a lacy pink scarf person; I'm sure I won't keep this scarf for myself, but my grandpa's new girlfriend Adorable Jan caught me working on it and said very casually, "Oh, I CERTAINLY LIKE PINK," and "MY, I HAPPEN TO, COINCIDENTALLY, LIKE BEADS. COUGH, COUGH," so I think I may have found a very deserving recipient for a project that is so close to me. Hooray!

Plug

2009-02-13T11:30:00.000-08:00

Dug has updated his blog with Parts 6 through 9 of The Eternal City series. Hooray!

http://poeticsmoke.blogspot.com/

Freaking Out

2009-02-11T05:34:00.000-08:00

I know, I know. I'm supposed to be fixing up my mom's house and also cleaning-purging-packing at my house. I know. But, despite the fact that I have three small knitting projects going to keep me sane, I'm silently freaking out because I don't have a sweater project going. I'm working on the Malicious Salad fiber very slowly, but while the yarn is absolutely gorgeous, I don't know if it's suited for a sweater. I might use it for very cute socks/hats/mittens instead; it would be great for those because I've plied it to be self-striping and the merino wool will be so soft next to the skin, just like my Nuclear Pumpkin sweater. (It's the same fiber; I bought four pounds of it.)

Not having a sweater in progress is really making me nervous. Really. Nervous. But can I justify buying and dyeing more "sweater" wool while I have so many smaller batches of unspun fiber and unfinished knitting projects filling up my house? On the other hand, the sweater on the cover of the last Interweave Knits is begging me to knit it. Can I justify ignoring it? I mean, how do you think that makes my unborn sweater feel, knowing that I'm refusing to bring it to life? Poor sweater. And that whole winter IK issue was about tweed, and I'm so wanting to learn how to spin something tweedy, and the challenge of spinning for a specific project would be so delicious.

I could do it slowly, too. I could pick out a nice, scrunchy wool and dye it and then I could work on it over the summer. I could let it dry and slowly work on prepping it before I move, and then begin spinning it when we transfer our crap to the other house. I could knit it over the late summer and have it ready for when the weather turns chilly again.

Some of you are asking: Why don't I just get on the innernets and order the yarn used in the pattern and start knitting? There are two answers: 1. Because that yarn, in the quantity needed for my ginormous plus-size sweater, will cost more than bailing out Wall Street. Spinning will save me money. 2. Spinning the yarn myself will bring me great joy. It's more about the yarn itself than the object made with the yarn.

Also, I've been letting my savings account build up, and after we move I am thinking of rewarding myself with a second wheel. I would love to spin for this sweater on my new wheel. I just have to decide which one. There's several candidates out there, and I may have to make the trip to Yarn Barn in Lawrence, KS and test drive some of them.

The Green Room

2009-02-10T05:37:00.000-08:00

The House Part 3: The Green Room
When my mom and I moved into my grandpa's house back in 1993, my mom made me paint the sun room (formerly my late grandmother's sewing room) green. Goodnight Moon, Kiss-Me-I'm-Irish GREEN. And then she spent the next few years turning the woodwork I'd painstakingly painted white into a dark, dark nicotine yellow. The ceiling, probably once white, stayed dark brown. She didn't want me to change it because she liked the nicotine as a DESIGN element.

When Dug and I began our house-cleaning last Tuesday, we quickly identified the "green room" as the most difficult room (well, besides the basement and attic, but we're just working on the living areas of the house right now) to clean out, and started there first. There was junk piled up to the ceiling. The walk-in closet could not be walked in to. There were mounds of trash and debris that had to be excavated before we could see the floor. Somehow, in our fervor, we got all of the trash disposed of, the treasure sorted through, the drawers emptied and furniture shoved out of the room, and at 10:00 that night we found ourselves giving the room a good coat of kilz.

The next morning, paint swatches in hand, we went to Lowe's intending to purchase a sophisticated, creamy beige paint to start coating the walls. We stopped by the paint chips to be sure we'd made the right decision, and simultaneously we spotted the absolute perfect color for that room. I felt Dug's arm tighten around me. My eyes met Dug's smoldering gaze and I breathed huskily, "We're gonna ditch the beige and paint it RED, aren't we?" Dug grasped my hand passionately and assured me, "Yeah, duh, you knew we would." I jumped up and down a little and replied, "Teehee!" Then I did some clapping and squealing. Dug shook his head and told me, his voice laden with anticipation, "You are stupid." I gasped. "No," I said, "YOU are stupid." Then we said that back and forth about 347 times until the store guy said, "You're BOTH stupid, okay?"

Anyway, the important thing is, Dug and I still agree, it's a really good red:
And also that closet you see there? Scott came over the next day and totally helped me finish cleaning it out. Woo!!

Zoetrope was asking me if I'll have a good room for spinning when we move. Oh yes, yes I have.

The House (Or: Where I've Been)

2009-02-08T08:22:00.000-08:00

I guess everyone who reads my blog is well aware that my mom has passed away, and that I've been MIA for a couple of weeks. I've been off work, at first taking care of my mom during her last few days of life, and then taking some time off after she passed away to put things in order again. It's been unpleasant - but that's okay. It's supposed to be unpleasant. We all have to go through it sooner or later, and hopefully we're all as lucky as I have been, to have so many friends to help us through it.

Speaking of friends. Wow. I know I am never going to get around to properly thanking all of you as thoroughly as you deserve to be thanked. (No, Scott. You won't be getting thanked THAT thoroughly. Even though you did clean out that closet.) I love you guys.

The House Part 1: The Mess

So, after all the craziness was over, Dug and family and friends and I began the arduous task of cleaning out my mom's house. Let me preface this by explaining that my mom did not clean. In the 33 years that I knew her, I never once saw her clean. A few years ago, I made the monumental mistake of deciding that I wasn't going to spend all of my not-at-work waking hours frantically cleaning her house in an attempt to keep up with her record-breaking speed at mess-making. I just knew that if I stopped enabling her, she'd clean. I know. Stupid.

When she got sick, I retracted this edict and tried to undo the damage that had been done. I spent every weekend cleaning at her house, but I never got past the dining room table and the kitchen. I'd work on the table for four hours, come back the next day and have to start over entirely. Eventually I gave up.

I was going to burn the house to the ground after she died, but turns out my grandpa still owns it. And grandpa wants me and Dug to move in to it. It is a bigger house with a basement and central air conditioning and a nicer neighborhood, my grandpa put a lot of work in expanding it over the years, it has 4+ generations of my family history in it, us moving in makes my grandpa really happy, and probably we were going to clean it instead of burning it down anyway. So, moving in is really the only possible decision. We're okay with it.

On the other hand...well. I forgot to take "before" pictures, but here's her dining room after Dug and I did some cleaning:

You guys might notice that the walls are PEACH. Years ago, mom made me paint the whole dining room and the whole gigantic living room PEACH. It's like when my dad painted everything in his house magenta and left it to me, except I think the peach is more horrifying. (Note: you guys will see prolific use of the words "horrific" and "horrifying" and "horrors" in the coming months while my blog is devoted to house fixerupping instead of yarn. Just so you know.)

Here is my mom's bedroom after my grandpa's girlfriend Adorable Jan removed 6 bags of clothing to take to the thrift store where she volunteers:

Here is my mom's computer room:

After a week of working on the house, we did get ONE room entirely cleaned out and painted. I'll post more on that later because I'm running out of room here, but it's coming together. That one room. Very nice.

The House Part 2: I Need A Contractor

No, seriously, do any of you guys happen to be or know a contractor? Because OMFG. Here is one little detail from my mom's bathroom:

I don't have to show you the rest of the bathroom. It's the same.

The most interesting part of my mom's house is the kitchen. Circa 1978, my grandpa decided to redo the kitchen, but alas, never finished. He tore out one side of the kitchen and put in new cabinets and drywall and a pretend window:

But never tore out the OTHER SIDE of the kitchen (also with a pretend window):Those are two facing sides of the same kithen. 1980 and 1920. Sexy, huh? I like how one side has drywall and the other side has plaster, but the whole room is unified with a thick patina of nicotine. I so want to cook meals in this room.

There are other things in the house that will require contractor intervention, but which I forgot to get pictures of. Like the giant fluorescent light in the dining room that no longer has a cover. That has to go. I'd like to remove the pipe in the living room from where there used to be a bathroom before grandpa remodelled - when Scott noticed it he began shrieking with joy because he thought it was a stripper pole. The utility/laundry room was tacked onto the side of the house in the olden days and is actually falling off, causing roof leakage and other horrors. (See, there's that word again.)

Unfortunately I am not insanely wealthy so I think I'm going to start with the bathroom first, for obvious reasons, and save the kitchen and larger stuff for later. The kitchen is perfectly functional; it's just...weird.

Stay tuned for more installments on The House.

PRO NUNTZ EEE AY SHUN

2009-01-13T11:11:00.000-08:00

With Jennifer's permission (and a provision that I allow her to make fun of my driving and the fact that I frequently fall on my ass in parking lots for no apparent reason whenever she pleases), I am going to post a little pronunciation guide to help her out with a couple of problem words.

1. WHORL: Pronounced "wurl" or "worl".
A whorl on a spinning wheel determines how many times the flyer turns per one turn of the drive wheel. Although it is not pronounced, as Jennifer would have us think, "whore-ell" or "whore-thingy," I think Jennifer's way is better and I intend to use hers from now on.

2. CTHULHU: Pronounced "kuh-thoo-loo". A fictional character by H.P. Lovecraft, Cthulhu is a high priest of elderly gods, according to dictionary.com, and his name is not pronounced "CHALUPA."

I was so confused when Jennifer asked to borrow my Creepy Cute Crochet book so she could make a chalupa. I cannot tell you how delighted I was when I discovered she was trying to say Cthulhu. I may have squealed.

I am sure she is on her blog right now, telling all of you about the alarming number of interesting maneuvers I executed while driving at lunch today and describing in detail the time I spontaneously "sat down" in the parking lot of Jason's Deli in front of hundreds of stunned onlookers.

What Pisses Me Off About Dug

2009-01-09T06:27:00.000-08:00

What pisses me off about Dug is that he can spontaneously belt out a rough draft of a piece of fiction he's only halfassedly committed to, and it's better than most of the stuff you can pull off the shelf at the bookstore. Whereas, I've always wanted to write and I struggle and struggle and struggle and write and rewrite and after five drafts my drivel is just utter crap compared to Dug's first draft note-writing. The words just fall out of his brain, perfectly composed, seemingly without effort, ready to be published.

Well, "ready to be published" except that he never, ever finishes anything, despite his undying passion to become an author. He passes a computer screen, projectile-vomits brilliance onto it and moves on, completely unaware that he's done something incredible. (Whereas, I'll never finish anything simply because I'm just not that freaking good at it and oh, look, yarn!)

I would like to express my displeasure at the unfairness of this, but it would involve a stream of very unladylike words, and you all know I'd never say anything impolite. Instead, I'm going to get a posse together to encourage Dug to finish a book, any book - he has three in the works, that I know of - and submit it to a grown-up publisher. (I'm going to call it the Finish Your #$#$## Book Posse.) Dug's writing blog, where he's posted some infuriatingly clever off-the-top-of-his-head first drafts of various things, including a working series entitled The Eternal City, can be found here: http://poeticsmoke.blogspot.com/

At last!

2009-01-05T06:46:00.001-08:00

The day I thought would never come is upon us: Jennifer has started a blog. http://anythingbutsocks.blogspot.com/

Not only has she started a blog, but she's awaiting her very own spinning wheel.

Victory is mine!

About 2008

2008-12-31T11:41:00.000-08:00

Good Things Which Took Place During The Year 2008:

1. I got a spinning wheel.

2. I knitted a bunch of crap, including this scarf, which is finally finished, and which I adore:

Yes, yes I am wearing it indoors, with my jammies, while I am using the computer. I can do what I want.

I was about to make a list of Not So Good Things That Happened In 2008 and wallow in the misery of mortality and...bah. Can't do it. I'm ending this year with a smile on my face.

My not-so-good thing of 2008 has been my mom having cancer. How downtrodden can I justifiably be, though? After all, she's living to see the new year. Despite being in hospice care, she's vibrantly alive, staying in my home, hasn't been sick or in a lot of pain, has already beaten the odds she was given and she's cheerfully suggesting, "Update your blog, you miserable little bitch!" Sure thing, mom!

I guess I should be adding "mom kicking cancer's ass" to the top of the list of good things that happened in 2008.

Nevertheless, Angus is still getting drunk tonight:

And Stuff

2008-12-12T12:04:00.000-08:00

I haven't been blogging because I've been busy and stuff, but I haven't altogether stopped knitting. I found the perfect pattern for my red goatstuff yarn - "Delphinium" by Julie Sprague - and special-ordered beads for it and everything. I had never knitted anything with beads before, and at first I thought it would be a pain in the ass, but I LOVE putting the beads on. In this pattern, instead of stringing the beads onto the yarn ahead of time, you just slip them on over the designated knitted stitch as you go.

Here is a crappy picture of the unblocked/unfinished scarf and my thingie of beads:
Here is a crappy close-up picture of the unfinished scarf: I even had to make a little tool out of a straight pin in order to hook the beads onto the loops of yarn. I'm like MacGyver!

AllieHat

2008-11-24T13:34:00.000-08:00

Since it's quite clear that we're going with the fabulous name Malicious Salad for my new fiber, I thought Jocelyn deserved a prize, so I knitted up this hat ("An Unoriginal Hat" by Stephanie Pearl McPhee) for her daughter, Allison. Jocelyn even gave me props on her family blog, so I am pleased and proud that her prize was met with approval! She also took this photo, which I happily stole from her:

Check out Jocelyn's blog for a picture of Allie actually wearing it. Cuteness!

I am thinking of making this same hat for Dug's cousin Jodee for Xmas. Normally, I am violently opposed to holiday-gift-knitting because I end up not being able to fulfill all of my promises...but I will do anything for Jodee. I frequently tell Dug that if he should ever leave me, I get to keep Jodee. He thinks her parents would have something to say about this, but I'm sure we can work out a deal.

Bitter Irony and a Confession

2008-11-17T05:34:00.000-08:00

Those of you who know me find yourselves rolling your eyes in exasperation every time you ask me, "Have you seen [this show]?" and then remember that no, of course not - if it is a show, featured on a television, I have not seen it. On the rare occasions that television and I have crossed paths, it's because it was on at someone else's house while I was visiting. Even as a child, I watched television if someone else happened to be watching it, but the idea of having to sit down in front of the TV at a certain time every week to watch a certain show freaked me out. I never wanted to be held hostage by a flashy talking box. It's not the quality or content of TV programming that bothers me; I know there's lots of good stuff to see that I am missing out on. It's just the scheduling, the commitment, the obligation that bothers me. Times have changed, of course; there's TIVO and stuff...but that kind of television-watching technology, again, takes commitment.

This aside, I have to admit that the whole reason I ever picked up knitting needles was television. It was after college, my dad was sick, I was keeping him company...in front of the television. Day after day, hour after hour, we watched the Discovery channel at a volume so high it made the walls shake. It was torture. TORTURE. Then, one fateful day as I was cleaning up around my mom's house, I found some ancient, magenta, plastic Boye knitting needles and came to a crossroads: I could use those needles to gouge my eyes and eardrums out so that I would not have to experience the television anymore, OR I could use them to keep my hands busy. I had always wanted to learn to knit, so the more constructive option won.

That's not the real confession, though - it gets worse. I got a spinning wheel, right? Well, it's really hard to spin for hours at a time with nothing else going on around me. I mean, spinning is delightful and fascinating...but it's pretty repetitive. It's a great tool for meditation in that respect; it's so nice to sit down at the wheel and think through all the stuff in your life that needs thinking through. I'm about as deep as my coffee mug, though, so after about five minutes of that crap, I'm ready to put a movie on.

Cable is still useless to me; I hate remote controls and having to be in the right place at the right time to see what I want to see...but Netflix, oh Netflix. I can plop my wheel down in front of the computer and "Watch Instantly" anything I want online and pay attention to it in a very half-assed way as I enjoy spinning. That's just the irony part, though. The confession is this:

I've been watching TV shows on Netflix. It started with Doctor Who, because my friends like it, but now it's spreading to other things, stuff that people have been watching for ages, but I'm only just discovering. 30 Rock, Heroes, Dexter. (I am NOT "just like Dexter", people. Stop saying that. He's a MAN, for goodness' sake.)

I'm not sorry, though; I get a boatload of knitting and spinning done, and I don't have to be monogamous to a television-machine this way.

(You guys want to suggest any good television shows I should catch up on? First person to say "Lost" gets slapped.)

Words of Wisdom

2008-11-13T06:34:00.001-08:00

In response to my sweater hang-up, Jennifer points out, "I wouldn't trust a knitter who got it right on the first try."

YEAH. That's right. That's exactly right.

Pride and Punishment

2008-11-11T05:33:00.000-08:00

Austen and Dostoevsky should have collaborated, or at least dated. But, no - the internet tells me that Jane died at the tender age of 42, just three years before little Fyodor was born. No dating for them. ANYWAY, back to the topic - my own downfall, my Pride and my Punishment.

PRIDE: After I blocked Nuclear Pumpkin, it was fantastic. It fit me perfectly. On Saturday, I wrote the previous blog post in which I bragged and bragged and boasted on and on about my greatness, and then I wore the sweater Saturday night and basked in the admiration of my friends. I wore it to work yesterday and bragged and boasted and showed off and then...and then...Nuclear Pumpkin started doing Something Weird. The springy wool started contracting. It started getting shorter and shorter...until it was FAR shorter than it was BEFORE I'd blocked it. By the end of the day, it was sticking out around my body like an orange flying saucer. I should have anticipated this, because as I was knitting it, I could see that the wool wanted to contract in length. I figured blocking would fix it, because it wasn't pulling in all that much. I did not anticipate that it would just shrink, right on my body, while I was wearing it. Lesson Learned, for the 135th time: Wool is Strange Stuff.

(Oddly enough, it didn't shrink horizontally. In fact, it got bigger. I guess that's why Blugly's blocking worked out so well; I just wanted to expand the ribbing horizontally, while the length was already perfect.)

PUNISHMENT: None of this is as catastrophic as it might sound; I'm just going to rip out part of the sweater from the bottom up to where the decreases end, knit back down without increasing, add a little length and redo the hem, which I wanted to redo anyway. The hardest/slowest part will be ripping it out...and I may have already done that part last night before my family could stop me.

Nuclear Pumpkin: Not A Disaster

2008-11-08T13:03:00.001-08:00

Today I unpinned Nuclear Pumpkin from the blocking board. (Mostly because I was sick of it being in my way, more than because it was dry.) Dug helped me unpin it, and then came the moment of truth.Not only does the Nuclear Pumpkin Sweater fit me, my friends...it fits me and DOES NOT SUCK. I won't claim that it represents good taste or great fashion, because I don't have a clue about that kind of stuff, but it is soft and comfy. The bottom hem - the most worrisome element - fits me at the right place. The sleeves are the right length and they don't mind being shoved up to my elbows. The hem around the neckline, which you can't see very well in these pictures, and with which I experimented a great deal, turned out fan-freakin-tastic. There is just the right amount of length in the armholes, enough so that I could wear a t-shirt underneath, but not so much that the sleeves could function as a hang-glider. Oh yeah - and the side shaping that I spontaneously put in to account for the fact that my hips are six times wider than my waist? It worked out so well that it's eerie. I LOVE this sweater.

Here are my boobs.

Here I am, revelling in the perfect fit of my sweater, and wondering why I don't have lips anymore. (Perhaps they've migrated north, to my nose?)

Again, I feel the need to point out that when I finished this sweater, the bottom hem fell in the middle of my tummy, the sleeves were tight and weird, and the armholes wanted to sit on the tops of my shoulders. I owe the success of this sweater not to my mad knitting skillz (I am a terrible knitter - really) but to the miracle of BLOCKING.

Maybe someday I shall post photos and a play-by-play description of one of my earlier sweaters which fell to disaster, all because I scoffed at the concept of blocking. It is humiliating to me, but perhaps it may save other New Knitters out there from the same despair.

I know people will ask, and the answer is YES, Dug did have to talk me into changing out of my Dr. Pepper pants before modelling my sweater in the front yard.

The Great Pumpkin

2008-11-07T05:41:00.001-08:00

I had this wacky idea that I would finish my Nuclear Pumpkin sweater before the weather turned cold. Then, as the sweater progressed, I increased the challenge and told myself I'd finish it the week of my birthday (partly as a present to myself, mostly to free up time for holiday gift knitting).

Well...I totally did it! I finished it yesterday, with ONE YARD OF YARN to go on the skein I was using (although I do have one more skein left and tons more to spin). I wove in all the ends and sewed up the armpits (badly). I tried it on and it fit ODDLY, but one thing I have learned the hard way about wool garments is that you have to Block The Holy Living Crap Out Of Them to get them to hold their intended shape.

So, I soaked it in wool-friendly soap in my washing machine (no agitation; just soaking), and then I spin-cycled it, and then I soaked it again in clear water, and then I spin-cycled it again. Then, while the wool was damp and malleable, I got out my blocking board (read: large piece of sturdy foam insulation board - Maxim's brilliant idea), laid the wet sweater-blob on it and forced it into approximately the shape of...well, me...and mercilessly pinned it into place. It's just like stretching a canvas, except the canvas is made of sweater.

Let us all cross our fingers that, by the time it is dry, it will fit perfectly. Or at least not badly. Note to sweater owners: you can block store-bought wool or wool-blend sweaters if they are misbehaving. Say you have a hem that curls up or ribbing that pulls in too much or maybe it's just a little too tight in the hips. A good, vicious blocking might fix it.

I have come to terms with the fact that I am obviously a "process knitter" vs a "product knitter". As soon as all the lose ends of yarn were woven in, I wanted to shove my new sweater in a drawer and start on the next thing. It took a great force of willpower for me to block and pin it and THEN start on the next thing.

I will take pictures when the sweater is dry and I can model it properly. Unless it looks like hell, in which case we will never speak of it again.

No, REALLY...

2008-11-04T06:03:00.000-08:00

Today, as the fate of our nation is decided, as great decisions are made, as people give grave consideration to the power of their votes, another debate rages on. It is, perhaps, less important than the U.S. Presidential Election occurring at this very moment. It might even be labeled "trivial," or, indeed, "very silly". But it is a debate, nonetheless, and one that I must personally face every day of my life.

Let me give you a transcript of this debate, which occurs, as I mentioned, every single freaking day.

JENNIFER: We should go to Yarn Barn and get you more fiber.
ME: Oh dear, no, I'm not going to buy any more fiber until I use up everything that I already have.
JENNIFER: You always need more fiber. You have to have a stash.
ME: Oh dear, no, I'm not going to buy any more fiber until I use up everything that I already have.
JENNIFER: You need more fiber to spin.
ME: Oh dear, no, I'm not going to buy any more fiber until I use up everything that I already have.
JENNIFER: I guess I won't get you anything fiber related for Christmas then.
ME: You could get me a Majacraft Suzie Alpaca spinning wheel. It is only $850.
JENNIFER: No, you can't have anything fiber related until you use up everything you have.
ME: But a spinning wheel is a tool to use that stuff up, and I want a second wheel.
JENNIFER: You are a greedy bitch. Also, my cat died so I had to bury him in the back yard this morning.
ME: Sad - I just tried to make an eCard for you but it wouldn't let me finish it without logging in and sending them samples of my DNA and promising them my first born child. The card I was making had some trees and a giant lemon, and the lemon said, "SO SORRY" and then in big scrolling fancy curly text below, the letters popped up, "YOUR CAT IS DEAD", and then underneath I would have typed, "At least you buried him instead of setting him on fire in the middle of your front yard, like my dad did one time."

(Okay, this debate happens daily EXCEPT for the dead cat part. That part was extra.)

I'm going to win this debate once and for all.

First, I have the still unfinished Nuclear Pumpkin sweater. I am not sure about the fit right now; I'm a wee bit concerned that I may have to rip it back. Also, I am not even done spinning all the fiber from this project. I think I have enough to finish knitting the sweater, but there's still more NP fiber. Lots more. I may put the extra up on Etsy to see if I can make a buck.

Next I have the scarf that Jennifer and I each knit as a "Knit Along" sort of thing, and she started and finished hers in like a WEEK, and I've been pattering along on mine for two months. I'll admit that I love the yarn so much that I'm kind of savoring the scarf, though, knitting just a little bit at a time.

Then I have various quantities of fiber projects waiting to be started. I have about a pound of Mauch Chunky roving in two shades of blue. I have about a pound of alpaca fiber that I bought at that Apples and Alpacas farm. I have some flax that I bought at Settler's Farm in Wamego, KS this past Saturday. (A small amount, though; just enough to learn with.) I have some beautiful topaz bamboo roving that Jennifer got me as a present, about 4 oz.
Then I have sock yarn. I have the Patons Kroy sock yarn that I will not start knitting until I am done with all the other crap I'm knitting (shut UP, that is a SWATCH in the photo, not knitting), some Red Heart stuff in NP-ish colors that Jennifer bought me, some yellow Tofutsies...and not pictured, I have a drawer filled with 6,000 other skeins of sock yarn waiting for my attention.
Then I have spinning projects that have been started and not yet finished; the red goatstuff, and Louet brand Karaoke fiber (half merino, half soysilk) in the "Mermaid" colorway.

Then I have this...this TWO POUNDS of fiber that I dyed a couple of weekends ago. It is dyed in one long strip, going from orangey-yellow to mottled greens to chestnut (which broke into deep purples in most places - it looks more brown in the picture, but pretend you're seeing some purples in there, too). It is dry now, and beckoning to me. The photo below shows one of two matching rovings that I dyed. I have not named this fiber yet. Any suggestions? Dug wants to name it Fraggle, but it doesn't look like a Fraggle to me. (Well, maybe Whimbley.) Scott, this is your chance to get me back for "Moopsy Weaselsnard".

Anyway, can we all agree that at this point, I have QUITE ENOUGH fiber? Come on people, back me up here.

Row Counters (or Random Blog Filler)

2008-10-28T05:59:00.000-07:00

One astute reader asked me, "Would knitting needles with some sort of counter in them be useful? Seems like you have to count up shit a lot."

Actually, there is an abundance of many kinds of row counters. See this link: http://www.yarn-store.com/row-counters.html

As you can see, there are "kacha kacha" row counters (called that because of the pleasant clicking noise they make when you push the button down), electronic row counters, and little cylinder row counters that fit on to your knitting needles so you just change the count when you reach the counter on your needle.

Recently, someone even wrote an iphone row counter application.

I have the cylinder ones but normally just use the kacha-kacha one (I have the red one). For most things, I don't have to count or perhaps the pattern of the knitting stitches (like some of the socks I've done) marks where I'm at well enough. Or sometimes I just jot it down on paper.

For situations in which you need to know where in the row to do a decrease, increase or special pattern stitch, you just place a marker on your needles - a store-bought marker made for that purpose, a loop of contrasting yarn, or a safety pin will do. Pretty low tech. I have some plastic stitch markers that clasp and unclasp so you can move them around, but safety pins work just as well.

Maybe I've told you guys this story before, but one time I was knitting something that required careful row counting, and I was using my red Clover "kacha-kacha" row counter. I left off for the evening, slept, went to work, came home, resumed knitting, checked my counter and saw that I was on row 57. This was odd, because I remembered specifically that I'd clicked it to row 8 the night before, and I was pretty sure I hadn't done an additional 49 rows of knitting without my knowledge. I turned to Dug and asked, "Did you click my row counter?" "Yes!" he said triumphantly. "I wanted to play with it!" So a word of advice to female knitters - if there are men in your house, maybe stick with the cylinder row-counters or notebook paper.

Still knitting...

2008-10-27T08:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I woke up at 7:00. I had some breakfast, made some tea, and started knitting. Determined that I will have my NP sweater ready to wear this Saturday (because Jennifer and I are going on a road trip to a fiber store in the middle of nowhere, and I want to show off), I had already finished the second sleeve and joined both sleeves to the body. I knew I was in for it yesterday, because with the sleeves joined I had 434 stitches on the needle. I had to knit at least 5 rounds of 434 stitches before starting the raglan shoulder decreases. It makes me dizzy just thinking about it.

I knit from 7:30 yesterday morning, non-stop until - I am not kidding - 9:30 last night. (Okay, I took a couple of breaks for food and laundry, but they were really, really short breaks.) I can't remember exactly how many rows of knitting I completed during this marathon...but I think it's around TWELVE, averaging about 1 row per hour.

On the bright side, the very slowest-going rows of the sweater are complete, and I'm well into the decreases now, so the rest of the shoulders should go pretty quick. I could still make it by Saturday! Unless, of course, I finish the sweater and it looks like ass, and I have to rip it all out and start over. It could happen.

On the less bright side, Dug and I had rented Doctor Who from Netflix and were planning on watching the rest of one of the disks tonight...but in my befuddlement this morning I accidentally packaged up and mailed that disk along with some others we were sending back. Whoopsie. Hopefully Dug won't kill me too much, because I'd really like to finish this godforsaken sweater before I die.

On another bright side, however, those of you who are Dusty will be pleased to note that a certain project has been started, and will hopefully be complete by this weekend! :) I just have a button band and two little sleeves to finish up!

Drive-By Gifting

2008-10-20T06:02:00.000-07:00

I fell victim to a drive-by gifting yesterday afternoon, but fortunately I lived to tell the tale. I was in my front yard, pushing the lawnmower along the edge of the street, when suddenly a silver car squealed up behind me. Windy and Joe flung themselves out of the running car before I even turned the mower off. They catapulted themselves at me, hugged all the air out of my lungs, shoved something into my hands, and then, engine roaring and tires squealing, they were gone as quickly as they had arrived, leaving me scratching my head and, yes...giggling.

I looked down at my hands and discovered that I was holding a brand new pair of neon green Knit Lite knitting needles.

You know, so you can knit in the dark! Hilarious!! And useful!

(Thanks, Windy and Joe! YAY!)

Guest Yarn: Show-and-Tell

2008-10-17T06:17:00.001-07:00

I haven't been updating because there's nothing new - I've just been quietly knitting along on my Nuclear Pumpkin sweater. It's coming along nicely, though! I'll admit that the bottom hem is not perfect but a number of people threatened me with death if I ripped it out again, claiming that "it gives them a heart attack." Fine. (Probably I should not have even put that word "again" in there, because they didn't know about the first two times I redid it. Ahem.)

Anyway, since Jennifer is very busy and shy about starting a blog of her own, I thought I'd feature some of the stuff she's been up to! Jennifer, too, has been spinning her own yarn, using a Schacht spindle (At least I think it's a Schacht; it was actually mine once-upon-a-time, but Jennifer commandeered it when I got my wheel.)

First we have a yarn that Jennifer dyed herself. This picture is not remotely color accurate; the colors are pastels and they are more vibrant and varied. Jennifer called this "Happy Accident" yarn because it didn't come out the way she intended when she dyed it, but she was really pleased with the results of the finished yarn. I believe she was even thinking about entering this yarn in some sort of "Alice In Wonderland" contest, which I thought was perfect - in real life, these colors look like something out of the Mad Hatter's tea party.
When I interview Jen about "Happy Accident", she said, "The wool is a bit rougher than I wanted, but it worked out fine for a hat that I knitted, which looks like a big gum drop. That dye job was the first time I used food coloring and the colors didn't come out right. I was wanting dark colors (greens, yellows & browns); nope, none of that!"

The next yarn, I believe, was Jen's first attempt at spindle-spinning, using a commercial carded batt. Her FIRST ATTEMPT. Does anyone remember my first attempt at spindle spinning? Yeah, it was scary. But of course JENNIFER comes up with a nice, even, perfectly serviceable, soft skein of gorgeous green-blue yarn. How is that fair?

Next we have a bulky weight heathery-purple yarn that Jennifer spun from Mauch Chunky roving. I love the twist she puts into her yarns; it looks so professional!
Jennifer actually got me some of this roving, too, in two different colors. (You can see them by clicking on the link above; mine are Blueberry Ice and Huckleberry and I'm going to combine them when I spin it.)

I think Jennifer is getting closer and closer to adopting a wheel of her own. I cannot wait! She has her eye on a Fricke wheel that's already equipped with a WooLee Winder at a very good price. (I am going to be so jealous of her, but that's okay; I will just find excuses to "help" her with her spinning.)

DRAT.

2008-10-10T12:24:00.000-07:00

I've been floundering over whether to (A) save my money for a second wheel or (B) just pimp out my Kiwi to increase its functionality. I was going to get a WooLee Winder flyer for it. This is a special flyer made by an independent manufacturer, and they make versions for pretty much every spinning wheel on the market. The advantage of this item is that as the yarn winds onto the bobbin, the WooLee Winder automatically moves the yarn up and down the bobbin so that it winds on evenly - whereas normally you'd have to do this manually; stopping the spinning to quickly move the yarn to a new spot on flyer.

Wait, not explaining this very well for my non-spinning friends. Okay, here's a picture of my Kiwi, stolen from the internet. The part with the yarn-filled bobbin fitted into it is called the Flyer, and you can see hooks running along that top arm of the Flyer. The yarn is held with those hooks as you are spinning, and very often you have to stop spinning and move the yarn to a different hook so that the bobbin will fill up evenly. This is not a big deal, but being able to spin without stopping would be really, really nice.

I was all excited because my mom was TOTALLY GOING TO BUY IT FOR ME for my birthday. Except, I was certain that I had read that a WooLee Winder would cost $100, and that is all. But it turns out that it costs $185...AND with my particular wheel you can't use the existing bobbins; you have to use the ones designed for this Winder...AND those bobbins cost $31/each. So I added up the Winder and the extra bobbins and the shipping and it came out to $418. Which is a quite a different number from my originally budgeted $100. This is not to say that the WooLee Winder is not an amazing product and that the price is not appropriate - I'm sure it is - but I just can't justify spending that money on my little Kiwi.

DRAT. I am so disappointed, over this silly little material object. It kind of makes me feel petty/selfish/childish...but I wanted it! [insert temper tantrum here] Now I don't know what to do. Any ideas?

Stained Glass and Pumpkin Progress

2008-09-27T17:27:00.000-07:00

While we were staying with Dug's mom, Rhonda (or "Momda," as I like to call her), she was nice enough to teach us a little bit about her current hobby-of-choice: stained glass. You have to understand the level of niceness Momda showed us here: Dug and I, especially I, are clumsy and unfamiliar with the tools and materials, so there was a lot of equipment abuse and glass wasting while we were trying to get the hang of it - but Rhonda was completely patient with us even though I am sure there were moments where watching us blunder through this project was excruciating.

We somehow deleted the photos of the very beginning of the project, but you can see here that the design is sketched out on tracing paper, and we are cutting the pieces to fit and holding them in place with horseshoe nails. Each finished piece is wrapped in adhesive copper foil.
Dug made most of the color choices for our project. I love the amber glass. It's going to look so beautiful when we get it hung up in our window! When everything is assembled, you brush flux (which makes the solder bind with the copper) over the copper seams and solder over them. Dug did all of the soldering by himself. See what a fantastic job he did?

Somehow my Nuclear Pumpkin sweater doesn't seem as lovely in comparison with the stained glass, but I suppose I ought to give a progress report. I finished a sleeve and have a good close-up photo that is mostly color accurate:
The yarn is making a subtle striping effect. I really like it! I'm glad Dug has decided the colors are too "pretty" to be suitable for a tough, rugged, manly sweater. The blues are very "denim" - it's going to look great with jeans. Well, hopefully it will look great; I'm not a very professional pullover knitter yet, and I'm not using a pattern. I read "Knitting Without Tears" by Elizabeth Zimmerman, intending to use her seamless raglan guidelines, but when I actually started knitting I ended up taking the "cast on and knit until it looks like a sweater" approach. The photo below shows how I've started the body of the sweater, but the color is not quite right - picture pumpkin orange instead of brown.
I'm going to do a bit of shaping on the sides so I won't look like I'm wearing a potato sack. I'm fairly certain I'm going to screw up and have to reknit the body, but that's Standard Operating Procedure for me!

Alpaca Snugglefest

2008-09-21T14:45:00.000-07:00

This week Dug and I are on vacation, going to visit his family in Illinois, and we decided to leave a day early and go exploring. WHY LOOK, we just stumbled upon this alpaca farm! (Okay, so we had to drive 17 miles out of our way down a gravel road through complicated twists and turns, so it may have been SLIGHTLY premeditated, but that's okay.)
Mid-Missouri Alpacas is a division of Binder's Hilltop Apple and Berry Farm, located in Mexico, MO. Dug and I picked our own apples, cuddled some alpacas and bought us some ho-made apple butter. And some alpaca roving. (Yes, Jennifer, I got you a present.)
HUG THEM ALPACAS! HUG THEM! Here I am hugging a five day old alpaca - and you can see by my expression that I am laughing that horrid cave-man laugh that comes out of me whenever I've regressed to three years old. Huuuuh huuuuh huuuuuh! Mommy alpaca was chatting away at me and sniffing her baby's butt. What a good mommy!

The best thing about this trip (well, after all the alpaca snuggling we did) was that when we walked in the door, Sandy Binder greeted us and we had the Where Are You From conversation in which I told her we had come to visit because I am a spinner, and she said, "OH, look at my SPINNING WHEEL!" and whipped the cover off her Majacraft Little Gem. "Why that's a Majacraft Little Gem!" I exclaimed. Then she said the magic words, "Would you like to try it?" I was in the chair before she finished the question. I have been reading and reading and reading about Majacraft wheels, because they are freaking cool, and almost passed out from happiness at finally getting to try one. I had a big scare when I couldn't make it go, but then she realized that it was set up for plying, not spinning, and once she fixed it I spun and spun! I think she'd have let me spin all day, or perhaps forever, working on her big project for her, but I mustered up enough willpower to make myself stop. I LOVE the Majacraft wheel. It was so smooth, so fast, so responsive. Dug is very lucky that she didn't have any for sale in the shop or we'd have been suddenly very poor and sleeping in the truck tonight instead of in this comfy hotel.

Speaking of which, I probably won't be spending any more of our vacation sitting around in hotels with free wifi, so I might as well make this a longer update and share some stuff I hadn't got around to yet. I finished my Hedgerow Socks by Jane Cochran:
These are very comfy, knit from Knitpicks "Gloss" sock yarn (I think the color is called "Cosmo") which is 70% wool and 30% silk, and crazy affordable. I don't know if it counts as a "designer" yarn, but it is purple and soft and I would buy it again. (But in a different color, because I already knit this one.)

Also, I want the book Folk Socks by Nancy Bush. Those of you who are Dug will note that at www.knitpicks.com it costs $7.00 less than everywhere else and that it is already in my shopping cart and my birthday is soon.

Also, a few days ago, Dug took this picture of my computer desk. It's sad, isn't it? The monitor isn't even ON, and everything is buried in knitting.
You'll see here that I've started swatching for the Nuclear Pumpkin sweater. Dug and I have discussed this at length and decided that, while the colors are not necessarily girly, they are not terribly masculine, either. So I get to keep the NP for myself (woo!) and have promised to make Dug a sweater in a more solid, neutral gray. I don't HAVE any solid, neutral gray yarn in sweater quantity, so that's something that will have to be remedied. Sounds like I've got another big handspinning project ahead of me!

C is for...Cthulhu?

2008-09-09T06:36:00.000-07:00

Since we're on the topic of knitted novelties...ever have trouble finding appropriate gifts for the men in your life? Well, get your hands on a copy of Creepy Cute Crochet by Christen Haden and crochet them up a nice little amigurumi Cthulhu!

This little guy was my first attempt, in which I realized I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO CROCHET and was just making it up as I went. So his head is not quite round, and his little wings are ... odd, but it doesn't matter because I don't remember Lovecraft going on too much about the perfect roundness of Cthulhu's head. Not that I would, as I haven't actually read much H.P. Lovecraft, but I am very fond of him, personally. Two of you will remember once taking me with you on a Chinese-takeout-picnic atop his grave. I left a tasty piece of General Tso's chicken by his tombstone (because I didn't have a bottle of hooch to poor on the ground) and that cemented the friendship. (Actually, maybe I just DROPPED the piece of chicken, by accident. Actually, I'm not sure if I was the one who dropped it. Did anyone even drop a piece of chicken at all? Ahhh, memories!)
Also, I did a really crappy job joining Cthulhu's head to his body, so I decided that he looked cold and crocheted him a little scarf to cover it up.

Then I made this one out of leftover Blugly yarn. Doesn't he look menacing, even though he is only three inches tall and getting ready to scrub down the kitchen windows with his big bottle of Windex? "Rarrrgggghh! I am Cthulhu! I sit in the abyss and look scary! Snuggle me and despair!"

I'd say "I need a hobby," but that's how all this started.

C is for Cookie!

2008-09-08T06:30:00.000-07:00

(C is also for Copyright Infringement, but not really, because this is not an exact replica of Cookie Monster. This is just a googly-eyed hat. Ahem.)

Googly-Eye Hat Recipe For Infants
Yarn: Worsted weight, in main color of your choice, white and contrast color for eyes.
Other materials: Poly fiber filling for the eyes.
Needles: Size 7 or 8 dpns, size 6 dpns for the eyes.

Start with a multiple of 8 stitches. (I used 64 sts knit loosely on size 7 dpns, sized for a very young little one. If you want to make one for yourself even though you are a grown-up, start with 88-96 stitches...or measure your head, check your gauge and size accordingly.)

Hemmed Edge:
(1) Cast on (64, 72, 80) or other multiple of 8 stitches in waste yarn.
(2) Using main color, knit 1 row and join to knit in the round. Knit 4 more rows.
(3) Purl 1 row.
(4) Knit 5 rows.
(5) Fold edge up with wrong sides facing each other, put first stitch of the edge on left needle, remove the waste yarn from this stitch, K2 tog. Repeat until all the stitches from the edge are knit together with the stitches on the needle.

Hat Body:
Knit until piece is 3-4 inches from edge, then begin decreasing as follows:
Row 1: Decrease every 7 stitches.
Row 2: Knit.
Row 3: Decrease every 6 stitches.
Row 4: Knit.
Row 5: Decrease every 5 stitches.
Row 6: Knit.
Row 7: Decrease every 4 stitches.
Row 8: Knit.
Row 9: Decrease every 3 stitches.
Row 10: Knit.
Row 11: Decrease every 2 stitches.
Row 12: Knit.
Row 13. Decrease around, cut yarn and sew through remaining stitches, weave in end.

Eyes:
(1) On size 6 dpn, cast on 3 stitches with black or other contrast color.
(2) Move stitches to right side of the needle, pull yarn tight and increase in each stitch, then divide 6 stitches evenly on 3 dpns to knit in the round. (If there is a little gap in the center of the eye, just sew it closed when you're done.)
(3) Increase every stitch. (There are now 4 stitches on each needle.)
(4) Knit around.
(5) Switch to white yarn, increase every 2 stitches. (There are now 6 stitches on each needle.)
(6) Knit around.
(7) Increase every 3 stitches. (There are now 8 stitches on each needle; if you want smaller eyes you can stop increasing here, knit 3 rounds and skip to step 13.)
(8) Knit around.
(9) Increase every 4 stitches. (There are are now 10 stitches on each needle.)
(10) Knit 3 rounds. (Or more, or less, depending on your desired eye volume.)
(11) Decrease every 4 stitches. (8 stitches on each needle.)
(12) Knit around.
(13) Decrease every 3 stitches. (6 stitches on each needle.)
(14) Cast off. (Or knit around one more time and do another round of decreases if you wish.)
(15) Stuff eye with Poly-fil and sew to hat.
(16) Repeat steps 1-15, unless you are making a cyclops. (Another cute idea might be to make the eyes different sizes, or change from contrast color to white on a different row, for an extra silly character hat.)

Mouth:
In black or other contrast color, sew on a mouth in the size and shape of your choice. (How do you like that for instructions? Mouth: Sew on a mouth. So helpful.)

Optional: I wanted to keep the eyes from flopping around (although eye-floppage may be highly desirable on some hats, so this is entirely optional), so I sewed them together about 1/3 of the way up. To make the eyes point in slightly different directions, I went one row up on the top of the right eye and darted it to the hat, and one row up on the underside of the left eye and darted it to the hat.

I don't have ADD, really! Probably.

2008-09-04T06:53:00.001-07:00

It's just that I have all this stuff going on. Anyway, yesterday a friend of mine asked me to make a Cookie Monster hat for her little smunchkin, and sent me an example from Etsy featuring someone selling Cookie Monster and other Sesame Street themed hats, and this brought up a couple of interesting discussion topics:

1. Does this lady have permission from the Sesame Street people to make and sell stuff that is trademarked by them? (She might - who knows?) It was just interesting to me because I read an article recently about various knitters being stopped from doing just that by the television producers they were ripping off. They were ripping them off out of love (and several stories had a happy ending in which the producers thought the knitted rip-off items were so cute that they gave the knitters permission) but still - taking someone else's property without permission and selling it. Duh.

2. EEEEEEEEE! Cookie Monster is cute!!!

I didn't find a pattern anywhere (that was free and/or looked the way I wanted it to), and not wanting to rip this lady off by copying off her exactly (even though she's possibly ripping off Sesame Street), I bought some blue yarn and set about knitting in my favorite way - cast on and knit until it looks like a Cookie Monster. (If I was knitting something else, though, like a sock, I would knit until it looked like a sock, not a Cookie Monster.) I've cast on a few stitches to check gauge and encountered my first problem: I do not know how big a 6 month old child's head is, so how the #$#$ am I supposed to know if the size is right? I'm also doing a knitted hem (the one my friend showed me has a rolled edge, which is a little girly, and this hat is for a little boy) which brings me to my second problem: I do not know how the $#$# to knit a knitted hem. I haven't got very far on the hem yet, but I think I should have started it on smaller needles and then moved to larger needles when the hem is done; otherwise the hem threatens to be ridiculously bulky when folded. Probably tonight I'll start over. YAY, starting over!

Speaking of which, I have decided that I am going to start the Clementine Shawlette over. And I will probably make some modifications and just knit it all in one piece instead of knitting the two sides and grafting them together; I just have a horrible feeling that grafting with this particular yarn will be a nightmare. In which case it will no longer be a Clementine Shawlette, it will be something else entirely. Which is okay by me. I'm not picky. [snicker]

Rambling and Linkage

2008-09-03T11:56:00.000-07:00

Despite my lack of spinning output these days, I've spent the past couple of weeks knitting like a madwoman. I started and FINISHED the Hedgerow Socks (here's a link for more information about these lovely socks, and I'll graft the toe and get pictures up later this week) using Knitpicks Gloss sock yarn, in under three weeks. I've started and blasted through 1/3 of a scarf in a beautiful Plymouth Tweed yarn that I couldn't stop myself from buying. (If you click that Plymouth Tweed link, it's the green yarn right there - obviously they chose that specific color to represent their line of tweed yarn because it is the best green yarn ever made.) Oh yeah, and I've started knitting a pair of socks for Duglifer, using my handspun Fine Gray Shetland wool (from Louet), in a pattern of my own devising. (Devising = a doodle on a sticky note.)

Sadly, I've temporarily abandoned my half-finished Clementine Shawlette. I have to confess that while knitting on it during a movie, I wasn't paying attention and put the right-side-purl-rows in the wrong order. Instead of having a nice little horizontal line of stitches every four rows to accentuate the angles of the chevron lace, the line falls every four rows for the first 15 inches of knitting and then it shows up again in 2 rows, then in 6 rows, then in 4 rows, then in 2 rows again...and it kind of looks like ASS. I'm pretty sure no one would notice, and since I'm very likely keeping the shawl for myself it doesn't REALLY matter, but it bothers me enough that I've wadded the project up and stuffed it on a shelf behind some books. If it were any other yarn, I'd just rip it back to before the point in the pattern where I apparently lost 50 IQ points, pick up the live stitches and knit on as if nothing had ever happened. But this is that unnaturally soft Faux Cashmere (nylon) that I spun and it is incredibly slippery. When I've accidentally dropped stitches, I've had to grab and hang on to them for dear life lest they unravel right out to the very beginning - which would not be the end of the world in plain stockinette stitch; I'd just latch the column of stitches back up with a crochet hook - but in this lacy pattern replete with yarn-overs and decreases, dropping a stitch would mean starting allllllll over again. No thanks! So ripping out and leaving the stitches live is just not possible. It has occurred to me, however, that I could run a "lifeline" (this is fancy knitters' jargon for "needle and thread") through the row that I want to rip back to, which would keep the stitches from going anywhere while I pick them up again. I think I'll try that this week, because I was really enjoying knitting that pattern and I don't want to scrap the shawl after I worked so hard on it...and I definitely don't want to just finish it wrong; the mark of a good knitter is not Making No Mistakes, but ripping out and reknitting and PRETENDING you've made no mistakes. I'll let you guys know how it goes! (Because I know you're all on the edge of your seats about my shawl.)

Actually...starting allllll over again might not be the worst thing ever. There were a couple of additional places early on in the shawl where I made barely discernible mistakes and left them as-is because of the slippery yarn, but those bother me, too. And they might actually SHOW, after the piece is blocked. Ripping the whole thing out and starting over might be worth it. I think I understand the pattern better now, so the piece would be better for it. Your thoughts?

Froot Loop Socks and Birthdays

2008-08-26T05:32:00.000-07:00

One thing I accomplished in all the turmoil of the past month was Finally Finishing the Freaking Frootloop socks. I adored the pattern, and working with the luxurious Koigu yarn that Jennifer bought me.
I shoulda taken some more pictures of these - it's hard to see the pattern in this slightly blurry closeup. But you can see it here, in the pattern from the designer.

And now that they are, at last, complete, I am even more happy to turn them into a birthday present...although somewhat belated. (Happy Birthday, Windy. Love ya!)

Busy Busy Busy

2008-08-20T17:49:00.000-07:00

I don't exactly have mad blogging skillz anymore, but stuff happens. I've promised to keep my blog lighthearted and free from preachy stuff, philosophical meandering, ranting about politics and bringing everyone down with personal horror stories. I'll hold to that promise, and just say this: To all my friends and family, try to stay healthy and ALIVE, please, because I love you all very much. Thank you.

In the meantime, dealing with all the disease and death and destruction and even the occasional fantastically good news (Guess whose mommy does not have cancer anymore? MY mommy! YAY!) I haven't had much time or motivation for spinning and knitting, which naturally can't be prioritized over sick friends and mommies. However, the occasional sock gets knitted in a waiting room here and there (more on that later) and I do have, belatedly, some spinning things to show off.

Finally, with some Louet brand Fine Gray Shetland wool I'd bought on that fabled trip to Yarn Barn, I learned Spinning From The Fold, and it was the best thing in the whole world. I sat down and spun half a pound of wool in one weekend. I could not stop. It was marvelous.

Dug was so amused by my obsession that he took the above photo of me spinning like a madwoman. See how I've got the wool folded over my index finger, so I'm feeding the wool into the twist from the center, or fold of the fiber, rather than the end? Easy! Fun!
Here's one of the resulting three skeins of wool. I ended up with about 500 yards of 2 ply sport weight. I'm told that I will be using this snuggly yarn to make socks for Dug.

Slightly More Progress

2008-07-30T13:12:00.000-07:00

The Clementine Shawlette! (Almost half of it!)
Nuclear Pumpkin Yarn! 420 yards of it! (I probably need about 2,000 yards total, plus a little extra for swatching.)
The colors in the yarn are actually a little more, uh, NUCLEAR, but these photos are a pretty good approximation. The oranges are more vibrant in real life.

No Progress

2008-07-28T05:37:00.000-07:00

This weekend I knitted and knitted and knitted and knitted without stopping, hellbent on finishing at least one project.

Goal #1: The Froot Loop Socks. Surely, I thought, if I knit the last sock for just four more hours, it will be done. I knit the sock all week during carpooling time. I knit it after work. I knit it during lunches. I knit it through a movie. I knitted the froot loop sock until I thought my arms were going to fall off. It is exactly the same size as it was at the beginning of the the week.

Goal #2: The Clementine Shawlette. I decided to add more length to the first half of it before starting and finishing the second half over the weekend - a good plan! Not so naive after the Froot Loop experience, I counted the repeats I had done so far - 11 - and decided it shouldn't take me more than 1/2 an hour to make it 16. So I knitted and knitted and knitted it. I knit through movies. I knit at bedtime. I knit during the day during spinning breaks. I knit on the bed, I knit on the couch, I may have knit on the toilet. Last night I counted my repeats again. 11. (And the second half has not, despite my best efforts, been started.)

Is it time for me to admit to myself that I am a SLOW knitter? Is there some reason that projects which would take a normal knitter a week to complete must take me months of nonstop knitting? Is this fair? I need to find out who assigns people their knitting speeds and ask for a recount, or something.

Halvsies

2008-07-23T05:31:00.000-07:00

I haven't been great about taking and posting pictures of all my work this week, but that is because I have so many things in a deplorable state of Half Finished. I have half a pair of Froot Loop Socks knitted. I have half a Clementine Shawlette knitted. I have half of one Random Sock Of No Particular Pattern knitted. I have half of the singles spun up for the Nuclear Pumpkin sweater. All that work, but not much of anything to show for myself. Although, I'll end up finishing ALL of those things in one week and then I'll think I'm superwoman!

I also have a lot of yarn waiting patiently to be knitted, and with my spinning, the yarn pile grows bigger and bigger every week.

My plan of attack for this week is (and I'm making a list here more for my own organizational benefit than actually thinking all of you REALLY CARE how I'm going to get things done):

Photograph all the stuff I bought a few weeks ago at Yarn Barn when I went with Jennifer, and put it all up on the blog. I bragged about going right before we went, but never followed up with the results!
Finish the Froot Loop Socks during Car Pool Waiting Time.
Start a new pair of socks to knit during Car Pool Waiting Time, possibly with the dark purple KnitPicks Gloss yarn I accidentally bought while ordering needles for Blugly. (I need to find good, complex pattern for this project.)
Start on the 2nd half of the Clementine Shawl during Weekend Movie Time.
Knit the Random Sock Of No Particular Pattern during times when I can't really concentrate on counting and just need something mindless to keep my hands busy.
Learn a new spinning technique - Spinning From The Fold.

I think I shall put off really going nuts on the Nuclear Pumpkin stuff for now, because if I get any of it plied and skeined, I'll want to start knitting it right away and I have so much yarn to get through. I'm just going to keep plugging away at the singles. I did predraft a lot more of it this weekend. I'm guessing that I'm going to have a lot of NP fiber left over after this sweater. Yay!

Photo Mosaic Thingie

2008-07-17T14:35:00.000-07:00

Here's a fun photo-mosaic thing to do!
a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
b. Using only the first page, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd’s mosaic maker.

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What do you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One word to describe you.
12. Your Flickr name.

I cheated a bit - when I typed my name in, I scrolled through several pages trying to find a picture that did NOT include Mariah Carey's boobings. They are everywhere. It was quite traumatic, really.

Encouragement

2008-07-17T05:32:00.000-07:00

And now I'd like you all to take a look at JENNIFER'S NEW BLOG! Here's the link:

...

What? You say there's no link there? Hmmm. Let me examine the problem. AHA! There is no link there because Jennifer does not HAVE a new blog. Which is a tragedy, really, because even if it's only for the enjoyment of a few select people, it's the modern way to show-and-tell pictures and stories of your yarn and your kids and/or pets to your out-of-town friends. I bet James and Melia would love to see a blog from Jennifer. How about Jennifer's sisters? I bet they'd like to see pictures of little Bailey Boo and hear about Jennifer's knitting-and-spinning adventures. How about Cathy, and that one slutface girl? I bet they'd like to read a Jennifer blog.

My detective work reveals that the main obstacle to Jennifer's blog-starting is that she can't think of a new name for it. I understand - I picked a crappy, "top card" name for my blog because I didn't think I'd stick with it, and then the ol' center-of-attention thing kicked in and I can hardly leave it alone. So that gives us not one, but TWO contests:

1. Come up with a really good blog name for Jennifer. (Her blog will likely feature knitting and spinning, updates on her kid and, I would guess, various rants on the topic of Common Sense - see, we've peaked Maxim's interest already.)

2. Think of a much better name than I already have for MY blog. (This is not as urgent as a name for Jennifer's blog, though. It's all about Jennifer today.)

You can submit your suggestions in the comments or email me at Cry954@gmail.com. The winner(s) may name a non-secksyoouhl prize (unless Dug is the winner) of his or her choice, as long as I can afford it.

Off topic here, but I was talking to Dug in the car this morning, and I caught myself referring to a common, everyday thing as A-MAY-ZING. Ack! I can't believe I did that! I said "a-MAAAY-zing," you know, how GIRLS say that all the time, when they are uncreative and cannot come up with original, non-trite ways to describe things? Ugh! It was awful! It was like hearing someone else talking out of MY mouth. I feel sick. My vocabulary has already been partially infiltrated by "awesome"; there is no room for any more of this sort of thing. ("Thut's like ossUUUUUUUM.") Okay, I'm going to go read the thesaurus now. Geezis.

Next Up

2008-07-15T05:36:00.000-07:00

For the past few days I've been working on various odds and ends, with the intention of using up stashed yarn and fiber, and the realization that there's not much point in spinning all this yarn if I'm not going to KNIT anything with it. After much consideration, I have decided that my green-and-white Faux Cashmere will become a version of the Clementine Shawlette from IK Spring 2007. Shawls and wraps and similar girly items are not usually My Thing, but I want the super soft fake cashmere to turn into something I can snuggle with. Then Dug pointed out that I could put this particular wrap around my shoulders when I'm sitting at my computer, which is right in the path of our window unit air conditioner - which means I can now attach the word "practical" to this project and forge ahead guiltlessly!

I've started it, but have no photos yet. I do have this picture of the one lily growing in my yard, and since it is traditional for knit-bloggers to dazzle everyone with pictures of gardening when they have no knitting to show off, that is what I will do:

It isn't all that dazzling if you know that this is the one and ONLY flower that has ever grown in my yard, ever, and that it is quite hidden in a large expanse of overgrown weeds. But since you don't know that, you can go ahead and be impressed with my gardening prowess. (Hey, I mowed the lawn once, when I was around 13 years old - that's gardening, right?)

Best Compliment Ever

2008-07-14T12:37:00.000-07:00

"You would still be awesome if you were only make-believe."

FINISHED!

2008-07-09T05:58:00.000-07:00

Blugly is finished! All I need is one 1" button. Here it is blocking. (Color is not really accurate in these photos - it's less green and more Makes-Your-Eyeballs-Bleed-Turquoise.) This was the first time I've ever properly blocked anything, and it was not the ordeal I was expecting - I just soaked it in the washing machine and ran it through the spin cycle, then pinned it to the board so that it would hold its shape as it dried. Easy!
Here I am wearing it over my jammies. In the background you can see my spinning wheel and my Mickie Dog lying on his blankie.
On the 357th try, I finally got the button band looking halfway decent.
And it actually fits me! JOY!

Check it, yo:

2008-07-03T05:36:00.000-07:00

Carey's Yarn on Paradise Fibers! How cool is that?

In other fiber related news, Jennifer and I get out of work early today, and we are thinking of heading off to The Yarn Barn in Lawrence, KS. (Founded by the same Lawrence who founded YOUR home town, Zoetrope - I think this guy just meandered across the continent starting up Lawrences.) I have promised Dug that I won't buy anything until I am done spinning Nuclear Pumpkin, The Random Red Stuff, and the Gigantic Bag Of Wool I Haven't Even Dyed Yet. However, it would not be cost effective to make a trip out there, not buy anything, and then have to make a SECOND trip out there, what with the price of gas these days. So, if I purchase anything today, it will simply be out of consideration of our budget. (We have a budget?) Also, I intend to hold Jennifer to our plans buy promising to do the driving and pointing out that I owe her a PRESENT. I know she can't turn down a present from Yarn Barn! I wonder what she will choose!

I shoulda brought my camera with me today.

Elephant Jokes

2008-07-01T05:43:00.000-07:00

Today I have a real treat for you - pictures of actual fiber! I haven't been showing off a lot of new projects for the past couple of weeks, because I've been working so diligently on this:
This is "Faux Cashmere" from ParadiseFibers.net. I dyed it myself with Country Classics dye, also from ParadiseFibers.net. It is very soft, very easy to spin, and little strands of it adhere to the inside of your nostrils like you wouldn't believe.
It is very beautiful and silky smooth. I have no freaking clue what I'm going to knit with it. Any suggestions? I'll have 3 skeins of 300 yards each. That's a lot but not enough, I suspect, for a short sleeved tee, which was my original hope. I even had the perfect pattern queued for it on Ravelry. Here's a conversation I have been having with my mom (whom you'll recognize in the comments as MickieMcDog) about it:
Mom: I think you really should knit a T-SHIRT with it.
Me: I had a pattern picked out that would have been perfect, but I don't think I'll end up with enough yarn for that.
Mom: I think you'd be happy with a T-SHIRT out of it.
Me: I don't think I'll end up with enough yarn for that.
Mom: You need to make a T-SHIRT with it. Wouldn't that be WONDERFUL?
Me: Yes, but I don't have enough yarn for that.
Mom: Ohhhhh, I think a TEEEEEEEE SHIRT.
Me: See, I have a lot of yarn, but it is only 900 yards, and fingering weight, so it would take me 3,000 years to knit it and then I'd run out of yarn.
Mom: [and so on]......

Dug told me I need to show the process of predrafting Nuclear Pumpkin, and I suppose he is right.
I have been taking strips of the roving, dividing them up lengthwise, trying desperately to spell "lengthwise" correctly as I type, spreading the fibers out and gently pulling on them to make the spinning process much faster and easier on my hands. When I dye fiber myself it does tend to felt together just a wee bit, so putting all this prep time in at the beginning really helps. It's all worth it, because look at the pretty colors! It is not simply my Madd Camera Skilz making the oranges and blues glow like that; "Nuclear Pumpkin" really is a fantastic name for it. I absolutely cannot wait to start spinning it! Sadly, patience is needed here. I have bobbins of Various Crap to complete so that I can free them up for this project (which will make the "epic" Blugly sweater seem like instant gratification), and tonight I am going to ply the last of the Faux Cashmere. (Oh, and work on knitting Blugly. Yeah, whatever.)

[missing segue alert] When I was about four years old, my mom gave me a book of Elephant Jokes. It was, and still is, my favorite book. I have carried the wisdom that I gleaned from its pages, at the tender age of four, with me throughout my life. So, I would like to end our post today with a gift of profound insight for you all:

One of these things is gray and weighs two tons. The other one is an elephant.

Shiny Happy People

2008-06-26T05:36:00.000-07:00

For the past two mornings in a row, I have taken a shower and then pulled the shower curtain aside to find this:
This is what happens when Dug is woken up in the morning by Dug's 30 pound cat throwing himself on Dug's head. You may think the uncannily accurate representation above has nothing to do with spinning or knitting, but you are wrong: I fully intend to explore the technique of intarsia by knitting this image onto the front of Dug's Christmas sweater.

I Can't Grow Nice Fingernails, Either

2008-06-24T06:07:00.000-07:00

Now it's not just the gardening that is distressing me - it's the manicures. All of the other female knit-bloggers in the universe take pictures of themselves holding their projects or demonstrating techniques and they have PERFECT MANICURES. How is this possible? They work with wool, which vacuums all of the moisture out of your hands and causes your fingernails to shrivel up and split right down the middle. At least I thought that's what happened; apparently it only happens to ME, because every other knitter on the planet has perfectly shaped, elegant nails with just a touch of clear polish, and smooth, ungnawed-upon cuticles. Whereas I look like I clip my nails by shoving my hands in the garbage disposal every day.

I've tried the simple stuff - vitamins, heavy duty nail repair polishes, that kind of thing - but I need some serious help here. Suggestions anyone? (Someone told me recently that I should try NOT biting my fingernails/cuticles/fingers/hands, but how the heck am I supposed to do that? I'm NERVOUS here, people.)

In other news, JAMES L. has won the contest for naming my New Sweater Wool. (We were having a contest? I don't know, I just made that part up, just now. I can do what I want.) The orange and deep teal fiber shall henceforth be known as Nuclear Pumpkin. (Isn't that the best name EVER?) Nuclear Pumpkin. I shall now squeal with delight. EEEeeeeee!!

I Can't Garden

2008-06-20T06:11:00.000-07:00

What does this have to do with knitting, spinning or anything remotely to do with fiber? I DON'T KNOW, but I'm distressed. I tried reading some other knitting blogs - the blogs of highly esteemed, book-writing, pattern-writing knitting gurus, and all over their pages: GARDENING. Successful, beautiful gardening. Whereas I have murdered no less than thirteen shrubberies since my house has been in my possession, and every bulb I've ever planted has lain miserably in the ground without even a hint of life.

In other news, Jennifer spent last weekend exploring the yarn shops of Clinton, MO, and brought me back a PRESENT! That's right! SOCK YARN!
This is Crystal Palace bamboo-cotton-nylon blend sock yarn. The colors are beautiful, the texture is soft and snuggly, and I can't wait to start making a new pair of socks with it! (Those of you who live in my house will be saying, "Who says you're waiting? Isn't that a sock toe I saw on the coffee table?" Quiet yourselves.)

I was lamenting to Jennifer that I have so many delectable yarns piling up, not to mention all the spinning-and-knitting projects I'm coming up with, and how I have not been churning out finished projects as quickly as I would like, how I don't knit fast enough, how I'm not meeting my own expectations, etc. Jennifer, ever tolerant of self-induced drama, replied, but with more cussing (and this is highly paraphrased because I can't remember her exact words, exactly, with exactness): "What the #$#% are you talking about? This is YOUR hobby. The only person imposing deadlines on you is YOU. This isn't something you OWE anybody. Work on what you want to when you want to and shut up about it. Dumbass." Eureka! She's right! (As usual.)

I am not concerned about being verbally slapped into reality by Jennifer (on a daily basis), because I am permeating her psyche with EVIL. See this? This is a bunch of wool, and a drop spindle, and this photo was taken at Jennifer's house, by Jennifer. BWAAAAAAH HAAAAAAAAA HAAAAAAAAA HAAAAAAAAAAAA! I'm just waiting to see what her first spinning wheel will be. Heee! (Note to Mom: See that wool? It has been dyed and then CARDED to get that color effect, so I'll need you to buy me a $900 drum carder. Thank you.)

Of Procrastination and Predrafting

2008-06-19T06:07:00.000-07:00

I decided, with the huge 2+ lb pile of wool I've dyed for The Next Sweater, it would be a good idea if I predrafted as much of it as possible before spinning to ensure consistent results. Last night, instead of finishing up the first sleeve of Blugly, I pulled some of the wool roving into smaller strips, separated the fibers out and predrafted them a little, then wound the gauzy, drafted strips into pretty little coils and put them in a big plastic tub with a cat-proof lid. (You will note that I failed to take pictures of this. Perhaps tonight I will do so.) I did this for hours and hours - granted, I had to pause quite often to hug various cats and dogs who URGENTLY needed to sit on me and breathe in my face - and I have probably predrafted 1/32 of all that wool. Geezis.

Also, I got all excited yesterday, because I thought that I would be able to finish the first of the FrootLoop socks - after all, I'd knit on it for 5 hours on Tuesday, and probably an hour of carpooling-with-Dug time yesterday - but when I held it up to my foot I was nowhere close. So sad!

I'm noticing that knitting tiny little sock stitches makes my wrists hurt, so I don't think I'm going to be a professional sock knitter, but I'll get over it. I prefer focusing on sweaters, anyway. I'll just space out my sock knitting to give my wrists time to rest. Which will be difficult, because sock knitting is fun, and magical gifts of sock yarn appear on my desk every couple of months! (Pictures of latest magical gift of sock yarn to come.)

Weekend Update

2008-06-16T05:46:00.001-07:00

I'm feeling overwhelmed by all the things I want to get done, so I spent this weekend working diligently on Blugly. (I really did!) It's frustrating because every time I take a step forward, I take a step back. On Friday night I put the live stitches on waste yarn, tried it on, stared in the mirror, and asked myself the dreaded question every successful knitter must ask herself mid-sweater, "Does this button band look like ASS?" Sadly, the answer was YES. So I ripped out the button band, consulted the pattern, consulted the internet, thought about what I'd learned from knitting the Button Band of ASS and I feel that I have a reasonably good chance of knitting a non-ass-looking button band the next time around. I'm going to finish the sleeves before I give it another go. Also, I am concerned about the cabled ribbing along the bottom of the sweater. I read that it pulls in, and then you block it, and then it's fine, but man, it REALLY pulls in. I wonder if maybe I should block the sweater BEFORE I reknit the button band, to see how the ribbing turns out? That way if I have to reknit the ribbing, I don't have to rip out both the band and the 2nd half of the sweater.

You know, if I hadn't been knitting with my own handspun, I'd have just knit the thing up WRONG to be done with it, and just shoved it in the back of a drawer somewhere. But I know that if the ribbing doesn't look right, I will totally rip it out and reknit it. Is there a lesson in there somewhere for me?

Then I spent the rest of the weekend thinking about sweaters, and it is it really worth it to DYE and SPIN and KNIT entire sweaters? I mean, it takes a lot of time, especially when I don't devote myself to getting one thing at a time complete. I mean, how many spinning projects do I have going at once? A lot.
Truth is, I'm not that great a knitter. I've been knitting for 10 + years, but intermittently. And badly. After all I've gone through with Blugly (which is this pattern, Mr. Greenjeans, and most other knitters have had an easy time knitting it up - it's just ME that gets stuck on the learning curve), do I really think this is something I want to do over and over again? I mean, what an ordeal. How could I ever think of starting another sweater's worth of spinning?
I'll start taking suggestions NOW on what to call this fiber. For the sweater, I'm thinking that I may just do an Elizabeth Zimmerman "Percentage System" sweater and work in my own embellishments, rather than work from a pattern - that way after all this spinning, the sweater will really be My Own Work. What do you guys think?

Various Things

2008-06-13T06:01:00.000-07:00

The weekend is upon us! I shall start it off by showing you Various Things That I Have Been Working On. First we have the Navajo plied "Roadkill" Alpaca. I have a prettier picture of this in the sunlight, but this snapshot of it on my filthy kitchen counter shows the color more accurately.
I do have some more of this alpaca to spin into singles and ply, so naturally I've been working on that and not starting anything new, like this:
Okay, so maybe I started this red "Cashgora" fiber, to test out my new high speed whorl. I do not even recall what this fiber really is, but I suspect some of it comes from goats, and there might be some angora blended in. (Hence the name and all.) I'm struggling with it a bit, but that's because I'm not sure how to behave with the faster spinning speed, rather than anything to do with the fiber. The important thing is that I stick with spinning up all of this red fiber and getting the hang of the whorl, and then spend the rest of the weekend spinning the remainder of Roadkill and Blugly, as well as knitting Blugly, and that I DON'T procrastinate any further by starting yet another new and frivolous spinning project. That is the important thing.
Whoops.

Out of Control

2008-06-12T05:48:00.000-07:00

With all the spinning and knitting projects I have going on, or floating around in my head, I'm starting to feel disorganized. Ravelry helps, of course, but then I just start adding MORE things to the mix. (www.ravelry.com - I'm there as Carey954. For you non-fiber people who do not know wtf I am talking about, it's a very addictive fiber artist website.) Sadly, you can only add knitting/crochet projects to your stuff in Ravelry - I don't know that you can add spinning projects. So I can't really keep track of EVERYTHING there.

So here's what I need to get done, in order of priority:

1. Blugly - I need to Navajo ply the last of my singles (woohoo), finish binding off the button band, and knit each of the sleeves. So close!

2. Roadkill - I have a little bit more wool to spin and Navajo ply (I can't stop the Navajo plying. In fact, I WASN'T going to Navajo ply the alpaca, I was going to 2-ply it, and my mom FREAKED OUT at me until I agreed to Navajo ply it. We are fans of Navajo plying.) THEN, I need to decide what to knit with it. I'm thinking a scarf as a holiday present for my Grandpa, who likely does not read this blog so it will be a surprise.

3. Frootloop socks - they are my "carpool with Dug" project, so they are coming along. But I accidentally bought some new sock yarn with the needles I purchased from Knitpicks, so I have to remind myself not to abandon them in favor of new socks. (It doesn't matter how fiercely you love a current project; sometimes the lure of casting on something NEW is just too much!)

4. Koigu one skein gloves - another "waiting room" type of project. They'll get done whenever.

5. The "Leftovers" yarn - I love that stuff, and I'm having a heck of a time deciding what to knit with it. If I have enough, the bag on the cover of "Bag Style", perhaps. I don't know. SAD.

6. The red "cashgora" fiber (I do not even know what it really is) that I am spinning, using my high speed whorl for the first time around. I suspect it will be fingering weight yarn when I am done. More socks?

7. At one point, I bought some wool to knit the "Dashing" mitts from Knitty.com for a certain boy who lives in my house and is very handsome. (Fortunately, if he reads this and the surprise is ruined, he does not care about wool and mitts enough to remember it by the time winter weather comes around.)

I'm pretty sure there's about 4,000 other things I should be speedily working on. These relaxing hobbies sure are stressful.

Monday

2008-06-09T06:00:00.000-07:00

This weekend, I shirked all of my worldly responsibilities and I spun. I spun and spun and spun and spun. I spun all night on Friday instead of sleeping. I spun all day on Saturday in between social activities that did not involve cleaning or mowing the lawn. I spun late into the night on Saturday. Sunday I got up at 6:45 and spun. I took a short break to do some chores for my mom (in the most half-assed, unhelpful possible way) and then we went back to my house and I spun ALL FREAKING day. Here is what I have to show for all my spinning:

See that photo?
You don't?
You don't see a photo there, showing all the glorious results of my spinning fanaticism?

That's because THERE IS NO PHOTO. Somehow, all of that dedicated, frantic spinning resulted in nothing.

Well, not entirely nothing, but nothing FINISHED. I decided I was going to get all the Roadkill Alpaca spun up and plied, as well as the rest of the Blugly. Problem was, the Roadkill just wouldn't die. Every time I thought I was done, there was another little pile of it. It's like it was multiplying. I've started Navajo plying it, but I STILL have more to spin into singles. It's just not right. (Except that it is so fun to spin that I can't stop.)

I now have 7 bobbins completely full of something-or-other, so tonight I'm going to have to start skeining and washing; I was hoping to do a bunch all at once, but I'll have to do it in stages to free up bobbin real estate. Maybe I should order some more bobbins? How many bobbins do most spinners have, customarily? I do not know.

Let's just take another look...

2008-06-05T06:09:00.000-07:00

With all the stuff I went on about yesterday, I don't feel that this latest yarn I've finished got enough screen time. Let's look at it for a moment, shall we?
Even though it's from the exact same roving I dyed and spun for Blugly, it's a little softer, a little more sophisticated in its construction. It seems like every time I spin, I get better. I started spinning the sleeves for Blugly last night, and realized that the sleeves of the sweater are going to be wayyyyyy better than, for example, the shoulders. Heehee. I don't think it will be noticeable though. Only I will know. Except that I just told you all, but, you know, aside from that.

A Prolific Knitter...

2008-06-03T05:46:00.000-07:00

...I am NOT. I see the words "prolific knitter" smattered across every knit-blog I've ever read. (Just for kicks, I googled the words and came up with close to 3000 results.) Everyone knits, apparently, and PROLIFICALLY. Except for me. In 2008 I have finished ONE pair of socks, and they don't count because I knit 3/4 of them in 2007. Sigh. But maybe I could become a prolific SPINNER. I think I'm on my way.

And that's why this is going to be a really long post. Today I'm going to make up for not posting in ages by giving you the post from hell. Seriously, go get another diet coke because this is going to take awhile.

First, that muted orange and blue fiber I was working on turned into this, and was immediately passed off to Jennifer. (She's a prolific knitter.) This is a snuggly, spongy 2 ply. I may have to borrow it back from Jennifer and hug it until she is ready to knit something with it.
Next, the Fishguts wool that my mom dyed wayyyy back in January and I had spun one crappy beginnerish 2 ply from it. Finally, I ran out of Blugly to spin and picked up the Fishguts again. I got three sizeable skeins of semi-worsted 3 ply out of it.
Which reminds me, the internet has revealed to me that most of the time handspinners create 2-ply yarns, I think because it's faster and you get more yardage out of the fiber, but I really like the twist I get from a 3 ply. (For now; I have a HIGH SPEED FLYER kit on the way for my spinning wheel, that may greatly change my spinning results!) And since I've given up sleeping, I have plenty of time to spin the extra singles for a 3 ply. (I finally got myself a 3 bobbin tensioned lazy kate so I don't have to Navajo ply unless I WANT to. Well, I always want to, but it's not always the right choice.)

Speaking of Navajo plying, I dyed myself some more Blugly wool. You've noticed that I haven't mentioned the Mr. Greenjeans/Blugly sweater in some time, haven't you? Well, I've been quietly plugging away on it; I sort of put it aside in favor of spinning when I realized I wasn't going to get it done in time to wear end of winter/early spring, but it will be ready for me this fall! I have the button band to finish up and the sleeves. Button bands! Technically, I'm still a new knitter, and this was my first button band. I had to start over at least three times, and I'm still not sure if it's perfect, but I do not care; I am not starting over again. If it is ugly, I just won't look at the button band. And I am sure others won't notice because they will be blinded by the Blugly.
My next and proudest achievement this week is that I spun and 3-plied ALL of that leftover wool from Blugly. (You know, the stuff I demonstrated dyeing in my last post?) It is, so far, my favorite yarn EVER. I lament that I don't have enough for a sweater, but I did end up with about 380-400 yards of it. Come to think of it, I'm not above combining this stuff with store-bought wool in order to get a sweater out of it. Or I could knit a really nice bag or scarf or something? Maybe a Mistake Rib Scarf? What do you guys think? Suggestions, please! Next - and I'm pretty excited about this - is my very first attempt at hot pour dyeing. I had a batt of natural tan alpaca that I decided to experiment with because alpaca doesn't felt like wool does and I didn't have to worry as much about ruining it. First, I soaked the alpaca for 1/2 an hour - probably should have soaked it overnight - with a squirt of Synthrapol. I don't have a clue what that is, but the internet told me to soak my fiber with it, so I did.
Next, I mixed up my new, grown-up, Country Classics dyes in some pyrex mixing cups that will not ever be used for food, ever, because the internet says not to.
Then I heated the alpaca in my NEW DYE POT, to almost-but-not-quite boiling, and I poured the dye on in a stripe and tried to wait patiently for it to "exhaust" before I added the next color. I was not very patient. I was pretty sure I had not achieved the results I was going for, and when I hung the tangled, tortured mass of alpaca up to dry, Dug said that it looked like roadkill. Hmph.
However, once it dried, it looked like this:
You want to roll in it, don't you? You totally want to roll in Roadkill. You're sick. Naturally, I could not and will NEVER get a good, non-blurry picture of any singles-in-progress on the bobbin, but this is a current project and I'll try photographing it again this week.
Hopefully I'll post again soon with the alpaca finished and plied, the Blugly sweater's progress, some socks that I'm working on and...a bunch of other crap. That's right, stay tuned for more CRAP.

Leftovers

2008-05-22T05:33:00.000-07:00

After dyeing all the wool for the Blugly sweater (which, consequently, I will be knitting for the rest of my life), we had some left over. The wool has actually been not-so-pleasant to spin. First, it's full of vegetable matter. That's "VM" in spinning jargon, and in this case it means that someone mowed a field in New Zealand and dumped all of the clippings on their sheep before they sheared it and sent the wool off to be sold in the U.S., to me, so I'm constantly picking picking picking picking out tiny burrs and pieces of hay. Also, it doesn't like to draft; it likes to stick to itself and pill up and fight me. But, the resulting yarn was worth it and I learned a lot about Making Wool Submit To My Will from it. And it's such pretty gray, I thought maybe I'd just spin the rest of it up undyed. Then I thought, maybe I could just dye it a little bit, but leave some of the natural gray to be enjoyed. So that's what I did.

First I soaked the wool and mixed up some colors. I did this at random, having one idea when I started making up koolaid/food coloring colors and then changed my mind several times.
Here's the soggy wool, laid out on plastic wrap:
Here's my hand, wearing gloves this time, applying koolaid to the wool:
Didn't get a picture of the plastic-wrapped wool cooking in the microwave, but here's the next step, washing the dyed wool in the sink:
And here's some of the finished, dry wool, all wound up, ready to pre-draft and spin:
I've started spinning it already, instead of finishing the Blugly sweater, and I have to admit I'm enchanted with it. The colors looks so different in yarn form! I've only got 1.5 bobbins done; I'm going to do a third and then 3-ply it with my new tensioned-lazy-kate. I can't wait to see it plied!

SIGH

2008-05-21T05:42:00.001-07:00

I'm starting to think there really is a worldwide conspiracy to keep me from updating my blog. Last night I took a bunch of photos of the very wee bit I have accomplished over the past month and then, while uploading them to my computer, the computer crashed and wouldn't stop loading random updates and I gave up and ran off to spin even though I felt guilty because I SHOULD have been cleaning and then two hours later the computer was frozen on the "loading update 1 of 1, if you turn your computer off it will never work again and everyone will hate you" Windows screen, but I hardbooted it and finally got it to cooperate but then I forgot to make sure my photos had actually uploaded and then put them on flickr so I could access them and so...all I have to show for myself this morning is THIS:
A thumbnail sneak preview of some predyed wool I'd bought awhile back at the now online shop Cottage Fiber. This wool is now yarn, but all you get is a photo of the prepped fiber ready to spin.
Also, here is a picture of Mickie taking a bubble bath. He is neither spinning or knitting while in the bathtub, but these are the only two photos I had handy.

Not Abandoned...

2008-05-19T06:29:00.000-07:00

I haven't abandoned my blog, I promise! I've just been busy. And lazy. Very, very lazy. But I have amassed some new stuff to show off, as soon as I get some good photos taken.

Also, if he were REALLY a superhero, wouldn't his name be IronING Man? SuperMARKET Man? And my mom wants to know where BatHROOMCLEANING Man is. Where, indeed! (I should talk - like I'm just a real freakin' success at housekeeping.)

Cotton

2008-04-22T17:55:00.001-07:00

Yeah, I know - I'm not a good blogger. But I had stuff to do. For example, before I ever read on the internet that there are a thousand reasons that cotton can't be spun by a beginner or without a high-speed wheel, I bought this cute little cotton sampler at Cottage Fiber. (Which, sadly, is closing up shop here in KC but will be setting up an online store, so I highly encourage all of you to take up knitting and spinning and give your business to our friends here: www.cottagefiber.com)
Anyway, I bought this kit, and began spinning it. Took some time; there were a lot of embarrassing mishaps before I figured out how to make it work, but eventually I bent it to my will.

See? That's will-bending, right there, that is.

And here's the final two ply. I bought some inexpensive Lion Brand cotton to go with it, since I only ended up with one skein (from two cotton kits plied together, actually).

I'm not actually sure what to make with it yet. We found a good hat pattern, but now I'm not so sure. I think I'll put up a new poll!

Headline News: World Conspires to Keep Girl From Spinning

2008-04-08T05:30:00.001-07:00

Well, TAKE THAT, world. TAKE THAT: I know. It's more of the same old stuff. Here we have the final ME2, ready to be Navajo plied, the second skein of ME2, and some plied Blugly ready to be washed. I have two more bits of Blugly to spin up and then my spinning wheel will get to do something NEW. Probably I will spin up the rest of that Fishguts wool my mom dyed, and then spin the remaining bits of wool I'd bought to practice with. Then, for real, on to something new!

Just so everyone knows, there are NO PETS allowed in our laundry room. The laundry room is a pet-hair-free zone. Thank goodness there are NO PETS in this laundry room:
On another random aside, I noticed this label on a pizza box this weekend:
Wow. This economy is bringing EVERYBODY down.

Yarn Brand Idea

2008-03-27T13:16:00.001-07:00

Jennifer has decided to collect photos of Unfortunate House Colors, and has even dedicated an imaginary line of yarn to this theme. Yesterday, she designed this lovely ad:
I'm so proud!

Sock Karma

2008-03-26T09:50:00.001-07:00

I probably should not have congratulated myself on how well those socks fit Jennifer yesterday. Why? After four hours of intensive knitting last night, I accomplished THIS:

Not only is it very blurry, but it is not very much knitting. I started this sock toe over - and I am not lying, exaggerating or pathologically embellishing - SEVENTEEN times. Why, you ask? Corners.

Okay, see how, with this toe-up sock, there are little corners sticking up where it was first cast on?
With the yarn I used for these socks, the yarn is kind of thin and light and pliable, so those little corners are only visually annoying and hopefully do not cause discomfort to Jennifer's little toes. However, the sock yarn I'm using now is thicker and those corners - which were HUGE in my first few casting on attempts - would feel like hard knots under the toes. Just thinking about those corners poking around in my shoes gives me the shudders. Oh, and also, the WHOLE FREAKING POINT of hand knit socks is that they are super comfy in the toes because they don't have seams, as opposed to manufactured socks.

I thought that maybe the corners were showing up because I was an inexperienced toe-up knitter, so I just tried redoing it until the corners went away. No dice. Then I remembered there is this thing called the Internet, so I used it to look up other people's toe-up socks. Unless the yarn was super fuzzy and forgiving, those socks had corners, too. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any solutions or even other people freaking out about sock corners on the internet, so I tried idea after idea after idea to make the corners go away, hence the seventeen tries.

Trying seventeen times didn't bother me, really. What DOES make me a little twitchy is that it took me four hours and seventeen grueling trial-and-error attempts to arrive at this solution: Pick up a couple of stitches on the edges of the cast on.

Well, duh.

I'd like to make a special apology to my mom, who called me when I was on about the 14th try. Mom, those were very naughty, impolite words and I should not have said them. You are NOT allowed to repeat them, especially in public or at the restaurant we are going to tonight.

One good turn deserves another.

2008-03-25T07:56:00.001-07:00

Shocking news here, but I have ACTUALLY FINISHED SOMETHING. Here we have the completed Tofutsies socks, at home on Jennifer's feet.
It is a testament to Jennifer's enduring devotion to me that she (1) took off her shoes, (2) changed her socks and (3) threw her feet up on her desk and TOOK A PICTURE for me, in the middle of our crowded office without a care in the world that executive passersby might think she was crazy. Don't mind me, I'm just taking pictures of my feet here.

Jennifer asked me what pattern I used, and the short answer is, I didn't. The long answer is that I borrowed bits and pieces of various sock instructions that I, after many failed sock attempts, have tested and found to my liking. I used a toe-up sock cast-on from Knitty.com and the hourglass heel from The Twisted Sisters Sock workbook (which is a short row heel, using yarn overs instead of wraps), and increased gradually up the leg to match the normal human anatomy of the leg, because the yarn wasn't super stretchy and I didn't want the socks to roll down annoyingly. (Hopefully they are still not rolling down. I think Jennifer is starting to think I'm a little weird because I keep asking her every 15 minutes how the socks are doing.)

Apparently most people are supposed to have legs that are exactly the same circumference from ankle to thigh. I have not seen such a person yet, but I'm certain from knitting patterns and the manufactured socks that I am wearing now that this is what is expected of us. Yet, my socks are bunched around my ankles because they cannot be stretched out enough to be pulled up any higher on my legs. I realize that I have a lot of leg there, but for heaven's sake, I can't be the only one.

VALIDATION: This just in from Jennifer: "By increasing up the leg you allowed space for my fat rings around my ankles (in other words, after wearing them I'm not showing sock indention)."

Excellent!

Awwwwwww yeeeeah!

2008-03-24T11:36:00.001-07:00

I didn't finish anything this weekend as I'd promised myself, but I'm really really close to finishing my Tofutsies socks. It's a good thing, too. Know why? Jennifer went out of town this week, and she got me a present.

That's right. Jennifer got me Koigu.
Awwwwwwww yeeeeeeeah.

In other news, my mom got a new computer, so we spent Friday night and Saturday turning my old bedroom into a nice computer/knitting/sitting den for her. We're not totally done, but we're close - ready to scrub the room down and decorate it all pretty for her. It's been a struggle for her because when she got the house from my grandfather, she had to move our stuff in on top of two previous generations of stuff and keeping all of it tidy is pretty overwhelming (read: impossible). But, we're going to make some progress on it this spring. We should have taken before-and-after pictures of the room!

The Thing Is...

2008-03-16T17:36:00.000-07:00

...when you're working on an Epic project, there aren't many new and exciting things to report. For example, I completed two new skeins of Blugy this weekend.

But, see, this Blugly looks the same as the last Blugly, so not very exciting. So I tried spinning some ME2, to see if THAT was more exciting:

But that looks the same as the last ME2, so, again, not exciting. I'm going to have to finish something soon, so I can begin a fascinating new project. That will be my goal for this week: Finish Something. We'll see how that goes.

Anyway, last week Jennifer left an Easter basket on my desk and told me I HAD to take it home and share the goodies with Dug, and in an uncharacteristic act of selfless sharing, I obeyed. After devouring the goodies, I was going to ask her if she wanted her cute little basket back, but then I discovered that it is EXACTLY the right size to hold KoolAid packets:

See? How perfect is that? So I'm going to use it to hold my fiber dyeing stuff. Yay! (Thanks, Jennifer! Sorry if you wanted your basket back because I am totally keeping it now!)

Now, to distract everyone from noticing that I have very little to say, here is an exhibit of Mickie and Angus trying to smoosh as much of their surface area together as possible:

Cheer up, Jennifer.

2008-03-11T14:14:00.000-07:00

My friend Jennifer has informed me that she now understands why her parents kept chickens while she was growing up. With a flash of wisdom, insight and empathy, she has concluded that when a house full of three pms-ing, teenaged girls got too much for her father, he could just go outside and snap the head off a chicken. Sounds like my dear friend is about to go off the deep end. I guess matters have only been made worse by my taking a couple of vacation days from work, because I haven't been there to talk her off the ledge. I hope I'm not the straw that broke the camel's back...or in this case, the absence that wrung the chicken's neck. I'd be devastated if she went on a chicken-wringing rampage just because I wasn't there to soothe her nerves, so people: keep your poultry inside tonight.

In other sad news, my friend Maxim has departed Kansas City after trying to single-handedly rebuild my house from the ground up in less than two weeks. He's a madman. I'm not sure if I'm appreciative or frightened.

I didn't get much done while he was here because he kept making me fix things. (We did YARD WORK yesterday. Who does that? It's crazy. Crazy, I tell you.) HOWEVER, I maybe got a wee bit of knitting started on my Blugly sweater:

This is all of the shoulders, down to where the arms are set aside and the body of the piece begins. Not bad, eh? (I hope it fits.)

I also did just a teensy bit of spinning. Those among you who are Jennifer will notice that the above photo shows Blugly spinning, not Muppet Entrails 2 spinning, but I swear, I will get to it. I have absolutely NO PLANS to fix anything this coming weekend.

BAD Carey. BAD.

2008-03-04T05:51:00.001-08:00

Okay, so I've been a bad blog poster for...um...a week. More than a week. But this is NOT my fault. A friend of mine is visiting from out of state and happens to be very good at Fixing Things. Good at isn't really the way to describe it. Obsessed with Fixing Things and Cannot Stop Even if There are Video Games is a better way to describe it. And, as my house is a "run-down dump", it turns out that every single thing that could possibly be wrong or broken in a house is, indeed, wrong or broken. So, for the past week, we've been fixing things, non-stop. There is no stopping.

I swear to god, I got up at 3:00 this morning to go pee and before I made it back to bed, there was Maxim with pad and paper, showing me a sketched out idea about Fixing Things. NO STOPPING. (Yes, Maxim, that qualifies as Crazy. I still love you, though.)

It turns out my spinning wheel and my knitting are not wrong or broken, so they've had very little attention from me during this time.

However, I have observed the poll results. As soon as time allows, I shall commence my blugly sweater (okay, so MAYBE the shoulder part is pretty much done - pictures later) and address Jennifer's Muppet Entrails 2 fiber with the same hellbent focus that Maxim is currently directing at my house while I am safe at work.

THINGS MAXIM HAS FIXED/IS FIXING BECAUSE HE IS SO COOL
(AND CANNOT STOP FIXING THINGS):
1. Replaced an outdoor faucet and valve. (It was leaking.)
2. Installed a pet door so I can move the kitty litter to the garage.
3. Cleaned out most of the garage already. (Way above and beyond the call of duty.)
4. He's addressing the issue of The Magenta Door.
5. He's installing an exhaust fan in my bathroom.
6. The water shut off valve for the house is in a hard-to-get-to place in the crawl space, so he's redirecting it upstairs.
7. He installed smoke detectors so we won't die in our sleep if the house goes up in flames.

What else? I know that's not all. He never stops.

Conversation

2008-02-22T13:24:00.000-08:00

Jennifer: How about "YO" for a name of your future yarn business?

Me: Not a bad name at all! I should collect a list of names. Names for the yarn store, not names in general. People: "What is the name of your yarn store?" Me: "Stupid Poopy Booger Head".

Jennifer: How about Sit & Spin?

Me: [choke!] You made me inhale my water and spill it down my sweater.

Jennifer: To strangers Carey would say, "I'm the owner of the Sit & Spin store."

Me: We might attract the WRONG sort of clientele, though. Sleazy people dressed in dominatrix outfits enter the store, look around at all the yarn and fiber and wheels and say, "Well THIS isn't what I had in mind at ALL."

Jennifer: Future converts into the wonderful world of fibers & knitting.

Me: "Wow, this is WAY better than S&M!" they will say as I show them some knit stitches.

Jennifer: Just tell them to think of all the money they could save if they would just knit their own sex stuff.

Me: You know, I think they have pattern books for that. Frighteningly enough.

Jennifer: You're probably right. Very scary!

Me: You know this conversation is totally going into the blog, right?

Jennifer: Sweet!

Fashion Queen

2008-02-22T05:41:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I've been a bad blogupdater this week - but it's just because I've been spinning more blugly, so there's nothing new to show off.

Anyway, it just occurred to me how odd it is that I have no patience for FASHION, but I'm obsessed with KNITTING, which is essentially an act of clothing or accessory design/creation. How can I immerse myself in the world of fiber arts if I have no concept of Fashion? Most knitwear pattern designers have some sense of their own style; even if it's not a mainstream or conventionally "acceptable" look, there is usually an identifiable visual idea that they've taken to.

On the way to the office, I was thinking about how I dress, the things I prefer to buy and wear and, looking down at my three-years-out-of-style cardigan and my zip-up Keds sneakers, I realized I DO have a distinctive style. And that style is "Mr. Rogers."

Comparison

2008-02-18T18:34:00.000-08:00

After taking 327,482 pictures with my new camera, I finally learned how to FOCUS, I think, and managed to get a moderately accurate representation of two Blugly swatches. The swatch on the left side shows the Blugly that had more undyed gray in it, and the one on the right shows the full-force Blugly. Gray-Blugly is a little bit darker than it appears below, and has a lot of soft yellow splashes in it. It also has the saturated colors of Full-Force-Blugly, just mixed in with lighter colors.
I'm going to attempt to put up a poll so we can decide what to do. The sweater I am going to make is Mr. Greenjeans (click on the words to link to it) and I have an idea, in general, about how I'll use my Bluglies. (That sounds wrong, somehow.) Anyway, look at the sweater and then refer to my poll questions.

Anyway, that's all I did this weekend; knit swatches, played video games, tried to clean but turns out cleaning is REALLY boring and I don't like it, so I'm just not going to do that anymore.

To distract from my lack of accomplishments, HEY LOOK, A KITTY:

Dyeing Options

2008-02-13T19:16:00.001-08:00

One observant commenter asked me, "Dumb question, but if you want the whole sweater to be one color can you dye it after it's made?" Well, Maxim, I'm glad you asked that (because I had nothing else to talk about, really). The answer is: YES, you could, and that is how many solid-color garments are dyed, commercially.

Allow me to use some inadequate photography to illustrate dyeing options. In the background of this photo, you have a garment-dyed orange t-shirt, which gives you one very even, very solid color. In the top row, you'll see a ball of yarn which has been dyed hideous neon orange AFTER the yarn has been spun - again, giving you a very even, solid color.

In the second row, you'll see two commercially prepared balls of HEATHERED yarn; which means they were dyed as fiber (before spinning) with slight, purposeful variations in color and then machine-spun, so that the variations are distributed with precision throughout the plied yarn.

In the bottom row, we have a skein of handspun Blugly, and a ball of handspun something-I-bought-somewhere which you can't see very well because I do not know how to work the godforsaken flash on my new camera. The handspun Blugly has been dyed before spinning, with many painfully clashing colors to give it lots of variation and nuance in the final plied yarn. The handspun washed-out-flash yarn next to it was dyed in three colors, spun into three different singles, and then plied together. (So that the final yarn has one ply of yellow, one ply of pale orange, and one ply of reddish orange.) The advantage of handspun yarn is that it's more artistic and unique than something you could buy from a mill, and that you can produce design ideas of your own when you can't find what you're looking for at the yarn shop. So that's really what I'm going for.

The issue I'm having with the Blugly is that I BROKE ALL THE RULES BECAUSE I AM A DANGEROUS REBEL and did not dye ALL of the fiber ALL at the same time. I dyed two separate batches of yarn 2 weekends ago, and they are identical to each other. Following my careful notes, I dyed three more separate batches of yarn this past Saturday, and they are identical to each other. However, the 3 piles of fiber from this Saturday are NOT identical to the 2 piles from last Saturday. The most recent group has a lot more undyed gray in it. I'll update more on this tomorrow, but I've just spun a single of the newer stuff, and it looks, in my own words, "neato." So, I don't think it will be a problem if I artfully combine the two (as they do match) - but I'll photograph some swatches and see what you guys think before I start making the sweater.

1400 Yards

2008-02-13T05:43:00.001-08:00

We did the math, and figured out that I need approximately 1400 yards for the Mr. Greenjeans sweater, at my gauge. (That's rounding up, for safety.) Last night I plied a second hank of Blugly. THIS TIME, I remembered to count the wraps while I was winding the yarn from the bobbin to the niddy noddy, and discovered that one full bobbin of Navajo-plied Blugly yields just over 112 yards. So, 11 more to go.

That, my friends, is a whole lotta Blugly.

I was thinking about this daunting task I've set for myself, but then I realized I can spin a bobbin full of yarn in one evening. That's no big deal. (I'm sure advanced spinners are way faster than this - I am not advanced, and I am way slow.) I usually spin at least two on Saturdays. And I'm not the type of person to take the advice I've read in every spinning book or column on the internet and actually WAIT to make the sweater until all the Blugly is spun. Oh no. There will be no waiting.

Also, I'll be accepting advice regarding color as soon as I spin some of the second dye-batch of the Blugly. You'll see that although it has the exact same colors as the first batch, it has a LOT more gray in it. This is not a tragedy because it's really pretty. I want to use both, so I was thinking of doing the button band and the cuffs of the sleeves in the less-gray Blugly, and the body of the sweater in the more-gray Blugly. But first I have to spin it and take pictures of it, and maybe knit a swatch with both colors together. Then we can decide.

More of the Same

2008-02-10T17:36:00.000-08:00

I did a lot of work on my dyeing and spinning this weekend, with very little to show for it, because it's just More Blugly. It's gonna be like that for a while. Dug is encouraging me to mention that despite purchasing gloves and not dyeing my hands this time, I did manage to dye my nose blue. Which, okay, fine, I did, but it came off so there's no need to keep going into fits of laughter all weekend long over it.

In other news, I explained to my mom (well, I call it "explaining"; she'd call it "bitching") that she'd better learn to knit - and fast - because I can't spin and knit at the same time and I'm going to need help using up all this yarn I'll be making. And whaddya know if she didn't take me seriously:
THIS is the beginning of a beautiful seed-stitch scarf, out of the Muppet Entrails 1 yarn. I don't know how my mom learned to purl, let alone do a seed stitch in the few days she was practicing on her own. It looks really cute, doesn't it? Good job, Mom!

Speaking of new knitters! My friend Joe (of Windy-and-Joe) is also taking up the needles. Alas, he has learned the hard way that knitting and cats don't necessarily mix. Joe, repeat after me: "No-no-kit-tee, I don't want you to EAT that. Nooooo-NO." It becomes a sort of meditation mantra after a while. It's the knitter's version of "ohm".

Come to think of it, they should include cat tactics in knitting instructions. Row 1: Knit, Purl, No-no-swat, Knit to last stitch, no-no-swat, LET GO OF THE YARN YOU LITTLE #$#%#, turn work.

Blugupdate

2008-02-07T18:00:00.000-08:00

To tell the truth, spinning the Blugly wool has been a pain in the pooper. It's kind of snargled and tangly, and doesn't draft as easily as the Muppet Entrails 1 & 2 did. It's possible that I felted it a bit in the dying process, so we'll see how the next batch goes. (We dyed two portions of the roving last weekend, so I have a second batch all ready to spin tomorrow night. Report to follow.) Fortunately, even if the whole bag of wool sucks, I love it too much to abandon.

See? Oh, and you'll notice that this yarn is not blurry.
That is because Dug got me a NEW CAMERA for Valentine's Day, because he is brilliant and handsome and wonderful. Now if only he could make me be able to knit a gauge swatch with any tiny degree of correctness.

The sweater I'm designing Blugly for calls for a gauge of 18 stitches = 4 inches on size 8 needles. It just so happens that Lovely Jennifer gave me some size 8 needles she didn't like. Excellent! I knit a swatch and MY gauge was approximately 18 stitches = 237 inches. And I'm a really tight knitter. So I don't know what's going on. I had a similar problem using a DK weight yarn trying to knit a hat - the gauge was all over the place. I hope this isn't a nightmare in the making.

Luckily, a happy accident has occurred. I looked at the pattern after swatching with a couple of other sizes, and it says to use size 8 and then size 7 needles for the ribbing. I was thinking it said size 6 for the ribbing, so I had ordered that size from Knitpicks this morning. And THANK GOODNESS, because it looks like size 6 needles will be just the right size for the whole darn sweater.

I'm kind of happy about that because even though knitting on smaller needles means the project will take longer, the Blugly yarn is closer to DK than worsted and when I was swatching it looked a lot better on the smaller sizes. Plus, I've been knitting socks on tiny needles for so long that using the smaller ones feels more comfortable. Not to mention, people will be really impressed with me when they see me knitting a huge buffalo-sized sweater (assuming my gauge stays stupid) on small needles.

In other news, I have finished ONE of the Tofutsies socks and have almost started the second one. True to form, I cast on 16 stitches, knit two rows, realized I'd utterly botched it, ripped it out, cast on 16 stitches, knit halfway up the toe and realized on the first sock I'd cast on 20 stitches and used an entirely different increase pattern. So the toes did not match at all. I'll be starting on Take 3 shortly.

Navajo Plying: Why I'll Never Knit Again

2008-02-05T19:12:00.000-08:00

On Sunday, I taught myself how to Navajo ply. There are a lot of problems with Navajo plying, the main one being that I will never knit or do anything else or leave my house EVER AGAIN, because I will be Navajo plying. I am fully addicted to it.

Navajo plying is a technique used to create a 3-ply yarn from one single (rather than having 3 separate bobbins with 3 singles), by simply making a giant crochet chain and giving it twist. The advantage, if you have a somewhat variegated yarn, is that you can use this technique to keep the colors together.

Here is an image of the last of my Muppet Entrails I yarn (above), which I 2-plied, and the first of Jennifer's Muppet Entrails II yarn (below), which I Navajo plied.
As you can see, on the 2 ply, there are different colors being twisted together, but with the Navajo ply, the colors are all kept together. (I'm not explaining that very well, but that's why there's a picture.)

I love the MEII in the Navajo ply. LOVE IT. Jennifer is very lucky that I am a GOOD GIRL and and am going to spin up ALL of her MEII yarn and get it to her very quickly. I am NOT going to become distracted by my Blugly wool and do this:

I am going to Navajo the heck out of this Blugly, people. I mean, once I start spinning it. Which I won't do, until Jennifer's yarn is done. Ahem.

Blugly

2008-02-03T11:14:00.001-08:00

Yesterday we (my mom and I) began dyeing the wool for my Epic Sweater. We're just going to do this in stages because there's so much of it, which I know is a mortal sin, but we took careful notes so that we can repeat our steps when we continue next Saturday.

Here's a dyeing-with-koolaid tutorial for you. First, soak the wool in the sink with hot water and a few glugs of white vinegar for about 30 minutes. Yes, I measure liquid in "glugs", which is how many glug sounds it makes as it sloshes out of the bottle. I actually wrote down that I used exactly three for my soaking.
Then, we made up some colors mixing koolaid and food coloring. I had this vision that I wanted a nice, vibrant blue toned down with a kind of purposefully ugly non-color, shown below. The ugly color is dead-on, but the blue isn't as dark as I imagined. I decided the more neon color we got from the Berry Blue koolaid would work great, though. I figured the light gray color of the wool would help mute the color and make it richer. Next, we drained the wool and carefully squished the water out of it. You have to be very gentle with it, or it will felt. Felting is a fine activity, but not for my pretty wool that I want to spin.

Then we laid the wool out on a long strip of plastic wrap and began applying the dye in stripes, for a variegated effect. TIP: Wear gloves. My fingers are still green around the nails. I think this would be a pretty hot look if I were trying to seduce Frankenstein or a zombie, but not, perhaps, my husband.

Once the dye is worked in to the fiber - again, WITHOUT agitating the fiber so much that it felts, it gets rolled up in the plastic wrap and placed in microwaveable dish. Cook it for two minutes, let it rest for two minutes, repeat - until the water that comes out of the plastic wrap is clear. I cooked it for 8 minutes total, flipping the blazing hot mess over once after 4 minutes to keep the dye absorption even.

Once done, take it out of the plastic wrap and soak it again (without agitating it) in hot water with a little soap for a few minutes, then give it a rinse bath (keeping the water the same temperature), squish the water out of it and hang it over the shower rod to dry.

Here is how my wool looks this morning, all dry:

It's going to look so freakin' cool once I've spun it! I have some other fiber I must spin first, but it's going to take a lot of willpower not to play with this instead. I love this color. I shall call it Blugly, and it shall become my Epic Blugly Sweater.

Oddly enough, I haven't settled on a sweater pattern. I think I'll first see what gauge the spun, washed yarn turns out to be. I'm going to navajo ply it, which I taught myself how to do yesterday (more on that later) so it should work out to be in the DK/light worsted range. I'm thinking about doing something like the Mr.Greenjeans sweater from the Fall 2007 issue of knitty.com. But any other suggestions will be welcome! (Keeping in mind that only the last sweater out of 4 I've done was wearable, and I suspect my mom is just being nice about it.)

Heels and Toes

2008-01-30T04:56:00.001-08:00

I'm relatively new to the world of sock knitting, so I've been spending a lot of time trying to determine the "best" way to do things. This research has turned up something fabulous: Knitters will draw blood over their preferred method of knitting heels and toes. Just take a look at the internet - it's all out there. Short row heels, hourglass heels, flap heels, cuff down, toe up, magic loop toes, short row toes, kitchener stitch toes. All of these methods work, and all of them are despised by somebody. Heels and toes. If you like one method, you have to hate all the others with a violent passion, and kill everyone who does it a different way.

Which leads to my next thought: I'm afraid I'm a sock slut. I like doing a flap heel if it fits nicely with the design. Otherwise the hourglass method (in the photo above I've used the one from the Twisted Sisters Sock Workbook) looks fine...once I do it over THREE FREAKING TIMES to get it right, but that's a user error, not an inherent problem with the method. If the pattern allows or I'm just making a generic sock without using a pattern at all, I'll use the figure 8 or "magic cast on" (as featured on Knitty.com) to work from the toe up, so I don't have to graft the toe stitches together later...but if I see someone making a sock from the cuff down, I'm not going to stab her with my knitting needles.

Also, could someone explain sock blockers to me? Apparently when you finish your socks, you have the option of blocking them on wooden sock-shaped forms. But those big, flat forms have nothing to do with the shape of the human foot. My feet, like all other feet, are thick, flat and wide; they are not shaped like two-dimensional Christmas stockings. How does stretching my sock out in this way create something that is remotely comfortable to wear? Seriously, I have to know why people do this.

Bad Idea?

2008-01-29T04:50:00.000-08:00

It's fun to have one huge project on the needles and several smaller, more portable ones, and I have no Epic-In-Progress at the moment. I mentioned in my last post that my next Epic Project will involve dyeing, spinning and knitting a sweater for myself.

There's no getting out of it now, as I've already completed Stage 1: Buying The Wool.
However, a small concern has been gnawing at me. See, I have knit only FOUR sweaters in my life and three out of four were utterly unwearable. Considering the statistics, it's highly likely that I'll be doing all this dyeing and spinning for nothing.

I SO can't wait to get started!

UPDATE: When I got to work today, my wise and clever friend Jennifer suggested that in honor of my Epic Project, we should have gyros (lamb) for lunch today - her theory being that eating the young of what I will spin will give me power and insight. She's brilliant! I shall fortify myself with gyros!

Saturday Spinning Report

2008-01-27T13:47:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was a busy day. My mom and my knitting friend Jennifer and her little munchkin, Bailey, went allll the way out to the Yarn Barn in Lawrence to buy new wool for my next epic project. (We've all decided I should spin my own yarn for a sweater - more on this later.) Then, after much fun and goofing off (and watching Bailey try to lick Mickie Dog on the nose after learning that this is the proper way to commune with dogs), I did Lots And Lots of Spinning. First, I finished up a second skein of Muppet Entrails. Then, I attacked some wool that my mom had dyed.

Spinning this wool was no easy feat. First, I had to get past this:

Scary, huh? I felt like an epic hero battling a cyclops, or some far scarier beast, while trying to wrestle the wool out from under my 30 pound monster cat. Look at him. He's evil. And possibly drunk.

Finally I managed to pry Angus from the wool and distracted him by carrying him across the house to the kitchen and dazzling him with food. At last, congratulating myself on my victory, I returned to my spinning corner to discover this:

Sigh.

Needless to say, it was a late night. However, I did achieve a skein of mom-dyed wool. She failed to name her color design before she left, which I think she'll regret, because I have decided to call it Fishguts. Pictured here are Fishguts (upper) and Muppet Entrails (lower):

In other news, Jennifer has also dyed some wool for me to spin for her. It looks, oddly enough, identical to the Muppet Entrails fiber. She would like to announce the name of this colorway as Muppet Entrails II.

Some of you may remember that I decided Sunday would be Finish What You Started Day. I guess I'll have to report on that tomorrow, as Sunday isn't over and I've accomplished exactly nothing so far.

The Conquering of Tofutsies

2008-01-24T18:13:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned in my last post, I recently bought this sock yarn, and it really gave me a hard time when I started knitting with it.

I guess "having a hard time" isn't really the way to describe it; maybe "writhing in the seventh pit of hell" would more accurately convey the experience I had.

See this blurry sock? (Dug. New camera. Please.)

I cast on this sock, using the figure-8 cast on so I can knit from the toe up and not have to graft it later, SEVEN TIMES. The first couple of tries, the cast on just wasn't working right. (It's tricky, okay?) Then I knit about 12 rows and discovered that I'd somehow knit a huge stupid hole in the middle of the toe. How the heck did I do that? Geez.

So I ripped it out, started over, and got about 20 rows into it when the yarn started coming off the ball broken - not all the way broken, but with bits of the plies split and sticking out all over the place. This yarn is cool because it's made with several different sock-friendly fibers, including chitin (chitin, pronounced "kai-tin" comes from shellfish and crab shells), which is naturally antibacterial and gives the yarn a unique sheen. Unfortunately, it rather forcefully sticks to itself when it pulls off the ball, possibly because of the chitin, and I think that was causing the little plies to tear in places.

Anyway, there was no way to hide the broken plies in the fabric...so again, I ripped it out. I restarted it again, and again, each time having irritating splitty-ply problems. I nearly gave up on it. I threw it down and pretended to ignore it while gazing longingly at it when it wasn't paying attention, like a bad boyfriend.

I decided I would give it one more shot, and FINALLY, I beat the sneaky, evil Tofutsies yarn into submission. My casting on stopped being retarded. The plies stopped breaking. (There were actually a couple of weird oddities where one of the plies would be sticking way out and looped around itself, but I hid them in the knitting and we shall never speak of them again.) Check out that sock toe. That is a sock toe of the gods. It even looks good on the cat.

I'm not naive, though. Sure, things are going well now, but I know it will betray me again. I'll get halfway up the leg and suddenly there will be more splitty terror. Or something worse. It's going to let me down, again and again, but I'll keep buying more because it's just so darn cute.

wii interrupt this program...

2008-01-23T06:22:00.000-08:00

If I could get a picture to load this morning, I would show you a triumph of will over yarn. Evil yarn. Yarn that was kicking my ass, but that I overcame and forced into submission in the form of a sock. But, no picture. No triumph. Just fragmented sentences.

Dug brought home a wii from work last night. For some reason, I didn't accomplish much knitting. It turns out that it is really hard to knit and play wii sports bowling at the same time.

Look!

2008-01-21T09:05:00.000-08:00

I accomplished a lot of stuff this weekend. I spun on Saturday, and then decided that henceforth, Sunday shall be "Finish What You Started Day." In that spirit, I shall show you what I finished on Sunday. First, my "Azure Socks" from this winter's issue of Knitty, designed by Deb Barnhill. These socks are, so far, my favorite thing that I have ever knitted. LOOK, they fit! And LOOK - the design goes up the back. Isn't that clever? So cute.

Deb was going for a nautical theme in her design, but I used fuzzy yellow Frog Tree alpaca yarn, which makes my socks look like wheat. Which is appropriate because I live in Kansas, don't you think?

Next, I finished Dug's mitten.
Unfortunately, Dug insists that having a PAIR of mittens is really the way to go. Despite my better judgment, I have started the second mitten, and am noticing something alarming. I was sure that my second batch of first-time-spinner mitten yarn was just as crappy as the first. But it is not. It is lovely. My first mitten is a bulky mess of thick-and-thin fiber, which would be fine if the second mitten matched it. The second mitten is softer, with elegant, perfectly even little stitches and visible, tidy increases in the shaping of the fingers, which would be fine if the first mitten matched it. The only thing these two mittens will have in common is size and color. (By the way, I'm not using a pattern - I just did a figure-eight cast on and kept knitting until it looked like a mitten.) I am wondering if I have enough fiber left to make a third mitten that might resemble the second more closely than the first.

Finally - and I was saving this for last because I am SO proud of myself - I have spun and plied one skein of yarn in the Muppet Entrails colorway. (Thanks to Maxim for the name.) The fiber is a South African top - I have no idea what that means, but it is incredibly soft. It is not very even, but LOOK. Look how pretty it is!

I am so cool.

Snow Day & Shelf Assembly!

2008-01-17T17:08:00.000-08:00

Today there was snow. I hate snow, so I stayed home. Dug also stayed home, so I made him help me assemble the bookshelves. (You know, the ones I bought instead of hinge pins?) Everyone else in the house helped with the assembly, too. Here is Angus helping me read the instructions:

Yes, I AM wearing Dr. Pepper pants. Why do you ask? No, that is NOT my real nose. I don't know whose nose it is, or how it got on my face, but it is most certainly not mine. Nor is that gigantinormous forehead.

And here is every single beast in the house assisting Dug with the shelf construction:

Here I am sitting in front of the completed shelves (yay!), painstakingly drafting some wool, so I could very carefully, slowly, and with much concentration FOCUS on controlling the twist in my yarn...before I gave up and spaced out and just fed it on the bobbin with no regard to structure or twist and it was just as uneven as ever.
I filled up a bobbin about halfway with yarn, and then Dug and I each took about 50 pictures of it. Every single picture we took was blurry. How could we have taken 50 blurry snapshots? Then I noticed something. Nothing else in any of the pictures is blurry. Only the yarn. So I took a good close look at the yarn, and...it's blurry. So, this picture is actually in focus; it's just a shot of blurry yarn: I'm going to spin up another one of these and ply it. Who knows how it'll turn out, but this single seems a lot more even and consistent than my last session, so hopefully we'll see a difference in the 2 ply.

Probably it'll be real blurry, though.

Someone has been pooping in my guest room.

2008-01-16T14:42:00.001-08:00

Tonight's goal? Clean out THIS room...

...so I can have a quiet, non-dog-headbutting place to spin. I just got home from work and, being the responsible and dedicated housekeeper I am, immediately set about tidying up. I picked some rubbish and moved a box over and there it was. Poop. A lot of poop. A huge stash of poop. Al Capone's secret vault of poop.

I pride myself on my sleuthing abilities. In another time and place, I could have made it as a film noir style detective. I like saying things like "broads" and "dames" and "the game's up, buster," and other stuff I imagine film noir detectives would say. (Although, now that you mention it: NO, I guess I haven't actually watched any film noir detective movies. Why do you ask?)

Anyway, the point is: Nobody hides contraband poop in MY guest bedroom and gets away with it. I'll get to the bottom of this. (Get it? Poop? Bottom?)

So far, there are too many potential culprits to identify the offender with total certainty. (Jennifer, when you came by on Saturday, did you happen to poop in my guest bedroom seventy-three times? How 'bout you, Mom?) Only forensic examination will tell me for sure who did it.

HOWEVER, I have my suspicions.

Lefty

2008-01-15T18:35:00.000-08:00

I once took a quiz that showed whether you were right-brained or left brained. The results had a top-view picture of a brain with a quadrant graph superimposed on it, and a dot plotted on the graph to illustrate your brainededness. If your dot was plotted front or back, that meant something important (that I've totally forgotten), and if it was right or left, that meant you were creative or logical. My dot was dead-freaking-center.

I've always done the art thing, but truth be told, I come at it from a very left-brained angle. I see my projects a series of problems to be solved, like a puzzle. Lately I've gone blank on the painting (embracing apathy as a way of life is fine and dandy, but sure makes it hard to come up with passionate ideas to paint about - I can only render so many still lifes of vases and fruit), so I've turned to fiber. Knitting and spinning seem to be the right thing for me, because whether my fickle brain is feeling leftish or rightish, I can find a fiber-related activity to satisfy it.

Left-Brain Carey is driving today. My first spinning session resulted in the above hank of yarn, and a lot of questions. While I realize that spinning even, consistently twisted yarn and understanding when to adjust the tension on my wheel are things that will come with time, they are still puzzles. Puzzles have solutions, and solutions come from the internet.

Therefore, I spent the whole damn day reading the internet. I read about controlling twist and adjusting the Scotch tension on my spinning wheel. There are a lot of helpful articles out there. There are three thousand times as many articles that suggest that, "too much twist is bad" and "not enough twist is bad" and "if the tension is off, that's bad". Well, gee, that's helpful. I'm the kind of person who wants to know EXACTLY how many twists per inch I need in the weight of yarn I'm making, and EXACTLY how much fiber should go into the single as I draft, and EXACTLY how much I should adjust the tension and when and where I should tighten or loosen it, and the best answer I've come up with is "adjust as necessary." I'm coming to learn that there IS no "exactly" in handspinning. I might have to go breathe into a paper bag for a minute.

Or, heaven forbid, stop being cheap buy a book.

Frustration

2008-01-14T19:26:00.001-08:00

See this?

To the untrained eye, this might appear to be a sweet little doggie. (The one dressed as a bumblebee is the dog. The one in the penguin pants is my husband. Yes, we always dress like this around the house. Why do you ask?)

Do not be fooled. It is a feral MONSTER who insists on repeatedly ramming his head into my spinning wheel every time I try to use it. Because new things must be headbutted. Constantly.

I didn't make this rule, and I don't understand it. I just do what the dog tells me.

We have a guest bedroom, but we had taken the door off the hinges and hidden it in the garage. Why, you ask? Because my father, rest his soul, had painted it fluorescent magenta. Trust me, it was easier to hide the door than just paint it. You can't imagine how many coats of kilz it is going to take to cover that throbbing neon color. "Why don't you have a door there?" people sometimes ask us. "Oh, someone stole it," we say, rather than admit the painful magenta truth.

However, to solve the wheel-butting issue, I had this bright idea that I would go to the hardware store after work today and buy new hinge pins (because, for some reason, we discarded these), hang the door back in its place and then I would have a nice, closed-off place to use my spinning wheel. Guests to our home are usually announced, so if we're expecting anyone I figure I can just unhinge the door and stash it in the garage again, under a tarp in case anyone goes snooping around.

This was a fine plan. Except, after I got home from shopping I realized that I had purchased bookcases, not hinge pins.

The bookcases, once assembled, will be a fine addition to the guest bedroom. They are not hinge pins, but they are NEW. Newer than the spinning wheel. So perhaps I can set them up and the dog will headbutt them instead of my wheel while I am trying to use it.

Not Bad

2008-01-13T12:06:00.000-08:00

I don't seem to be wasting any time actually LEARNING how to spin. Yesterday I went on a "yarn crawl" with my friend Jennifer and bought some more fiber to practice with. Then my mom and I decided to dye the fiber. So we did, using the koolaid-and-microwave method. It turned out, in my opinion, pretty darn cool. It looks like tie dye right now, of course, but will look nothing of the sort once it's spun up.

While we weren't dyeing, I obsessively made 120 yards of 2 ply swalesdale wool. It's very coarse, but made my first marathon spinning session very easy. The fibers are very long and draft easily, making them a good choice for a beginner to learn with.

As I was told to expect, the yarn is not terribly even - there are thick and thin places in the yarn because I'm not experienced enough to keep the twist distributed evenly throughout the fiber as I go. The skeins (I made two) range consistently from DK to bulky worsted. I have read many suggestions that this yarn should not be discarded, but labeled "Designer Yarn" and sold for a high price. At first I was Appalled by the quality and was going to stash it under the bed and try to forget about it, but my husband encouraged me to knit a swatch.

Here is the swatch:

I have revised my opinion. The thick-and-thin texture, once knitted, is not appalling after all. It is darling. The astute will notice that the swatch has become a man's sized mitten. We will not call the mitten "darling" once I give it to Dug. We will call it "masculine" and "rugged".

Wheel Pictures

2008-01-12T06:25:00.000-08:00

I received a number of urgent requests for pictures (ONE is a number, after all - thanks, Maxim), so here they are.

Arrival of the spinning wheel:

Figuring out the spinning wheel:

And finally, my first mess of practice yarn:

I got a spinning wheel.

2008-01-11T11:49:00.000-08:00

I've been knitting for a while now. Every year for a decade I've completed a few simple projects here and there, the odd Christmas gift and the occasional ineptly constructed sweater. I enjoyed it, but inevitably put down the needles after each project in favor of other pursuits. Then it hit me. In the past few months I've gone through The Transition knitters sometimes talk about. You know, that metamorphosis from Casual Knitter to Raving Obsessed Knitter.

Well, the worst happened. I've become so fascinated with yarn that...I got a spinning wheel. My family got it for me for the holidays. My mom and I did the research and decided on a cute little Ashford Kiwi. Just to see if I liked it. Just to see if I could get the hang of it. I received it from UPS just last night, assembled it, and I DID get the hang of it (photos of Travesty Yarn to follow). It is just as wonderful as I imagined it would be. After my husband Doug, it is the best thing that ever happened to me.

That's how I've ended up starting a blog.

You see, I couldn't wait to tell everyone at the office about my marvelous experience.

So I did. When the first unsuspecting victim wandered into my cube for morning chit chat, I clapped my hands childishly and announced, "I got a spinning wheel!" She looked at me for a few seconds, blinking irritably, and responded, "What's a spinning wheel?" I was deflated. I tried explaining it to her, but it only got worse. The conversation ended with her asking me, "Why would you want to make YARN?"

I tried it again. I spotted a friend in the hallway. She started telling me about her day. "Aha," I thought. I waited, impatiently bouncing on my toes, until she asked, "How are YOU doing?" Grinning, I told her, "I got a spinning wheel!" Her nose wrinkled. Her eyebrows got closer together. "What's a spinning wheel?"

"Nevermind," I said.

I was feeling disturbed at this point, but I put it out of my mind. One can't assume that every fellow woman is fascinated with fiber arts. I moved on. Then yet another coworker instant messaged me. THIS was a friend I had shown knitting projects to. She would understand.

"I got a spinning wheel!" I told her. She said, "ipod?" Huh? "Er, no," I said, "A spinning wheel." A minute passed. Then she replied, "Is that an ipod?" I briefly considered gouging out my left eye with my letter opener, but thought better of it. I told her, "No, it's a spinning wheel." Another minute passed. Then she asked, "What's a spinning wheel?"

Oh for #$#$'s sake.

So that, my friends, is what has drawn me, a non-blogger, to the internet: The realization that I have no one to frikkin' talk to.

Hey, anyone who's listening? I got a spinning wheel.