So many hobbies!

A new spinning project

I need to have projects to keep me busy.  I have lots of ideas but I'll be the first to admit I don't always follow them through to completion, although I keep trying and some ideas are always in the back of my head.  That said, I've been following the progression of the beautiful shawl that Turtle Girl has been knitting and I decided to spin and knit one for myself.  This is the start of my shawl:

I wish I'd had this project idea when the Tour de Fleece began so I'd have a goal to work toward.  I work better and get more done when I have a deadline.  Anyway, I've started with the dark roving, about 8 oz. of a Merino and silk blend.  It's been a pain to pre-draft but I love how it's spinning up.  The medium blue on the left is Superwash Merino from Crown Mountain Farms and there's 8 oz. of that, too.  I'm not sure if I'm going to have two or three other shades but either way, I'll likely dye the colors I need.  Will I complete the spinning for this?  I think so, yes.  Will I actually knit the shawl with the yarn?  Well... we'll see.  I think you all know by now that I'm more of a spinner than a knitter. 

The Fungi singles are spun.  I'm still deciding on whether to ply or not.  There's no rush so they can sit while I'm spinning for my new project. 

Slug Day

I was a complete and utter slug today.  I slept late and spent nearly the entire day on the couch cuddling the cat, reading and/or napping.  I feel a little bit like I wasted the day but I really had no motivation to do anything.  Until about an hour ago that is.  I've made a batch of muffins so I have breakfast for work this week and I've done a bit of spinning on the Fungi roving.  Hopefully I'll finish it tonight.

It's not really this dark - the sun was going down when I took the picture.  (Sorry the photo is so big, I'm still trying to figure out the changes Typepad has made the Compose page.  I still think the changes are crap and certainly don't make things better.  Morons!  I'm guessing THEY use Wordpress.)

Yesterday I was much more productive.  I picked blueberries in the morning and went to dinner at my buddy Eric's later in the afternoon.  Eric sells sock knitting machines and a few of his sock machine friends were there.  Eric and I spun while the others did sock machine things.  It was a very fun evening.  One of the ladies there had just had a birthday so Eric made her a 3-layer spice cake with vanilla frosting that was heavenly. 

Does anyone have a good recipe for pesto?  All three of my basil plants need to be harvested this week and I need a good bulk recipe.  I could use any helpful tips, too.  I've never made pesto before.

So much to tell...

First let me tell you a story.  There we were, my sister and I, driving up north on the 4th of July.  I was only driving 60 mph because gas it too freaking expensive and I had a 3.5 hour drive up and back.  Anyway, I changed lanes, because the car in front of me was going even slower than I, and I wasn't paying attention to the traffic in front of me.  My sister, starting out quietly and getting louder, said, "Brake.  Brake!  BRAKE!  BRAKE!!!"   The traffic in front of us was slowing down fast and I slammed on the brakes.  We weren't slowing down fast enough and I knew I was going to hit the guy in front of me.  Hard.  So, desparate, I swerved into the far left lane, praying the car I'd seen there was not right next to me any more.  Fortunately, he wasn't and everything was okay.  Except that now, in order to slow down, my brake pedal was almost on the floor before the brakes would start to catch.  Very bad.  A moment after I got back into the far right lane, the Brake light came on and half a tick later, the warning ding started sounding.  Loudly.  The owner's manual said to pull over immediately and call a tow truck but we were 2 hours from my house and 1.5 hours from the cottage.  We listened to that darn warning beep for the rest of the trip.  I figured since we were just driving with no stopping, we could at least drive to our exit and then stop.  We wouldn't need the brakes until then.  The end of the story is we got to the cottage without incident but I had to have all four brakes lines replaced because they'd rotted out.  Nice.

All of this leads to my announcement that going to SOAR is now no longer an option.  I really, REALLY wanted to take the color blending class with Deb Menz but that's out now.  I was also looking forward to finally meeting Elizabeth face to face and having some nice, long chats.  Yup, new brakes ate a huge chunk of my vacation fund.  Sometimes life is a huge pain in the arse.  As a consolation prize,  I'm hoping to be able to get a group together for a road trip to Rhinebeck.  Road trips are very doable if you have enough people sharing the gas and the hotel room.  My apologies to my cousins in Texas:  a plane ticket is out, too, if I want to go to Sanibel Island in February.

On the plus side of my brake problems, when I was visiting with my family, my brother offered me the small chest freezer he has in storage that he doesn't need any more.  This solves my freezer needs.  And, as an extra surprise, my SIL's parents were visiting from Florida and her dad saw me spinning.  He said he'd bought his wife a spinning wheel when he was in New Zealand that she never used and asked me if I wanted it.  Of course, I said YES!  All I know is it's about 10 years old, was never used, and isn't a castle-style wheel like Owen.  I don't know who the maker is as they didn't remember.  I can't wait until the next time they drive up for a visit!

Is this not incredibly beautiful?  I bought this on Etsy a little over a year ago and I've been saving it all this time until I was good enough to do it justice.  It's 4 ounces of a Merino/Tencel blend.  It's spinning like a dream.  I haven't spun Merino/Tencel in a long time and I'd forgotten how easily it drafts and how smoothly it spins.  I haven't decided if I'm going to ply it with itself or ply it with a white singles.  I don't know if I'll get enough yarn for a pair of socks with just the 4 ounces but I don't really want to dilute that beautiful color with white.  It's my current spinning project for the Tour de Fleece so I'll just keep spinning and hope a solution occurs to me soon.

The blueberries are ripe for the picking starting this weekend so that's where I'll be Saturday morning, and possibly Sunday if my freezer isn't full after Saturday.  That reminds me, I need to clean out the freezer and see just how much room I have.  I don't have the gifted chest feezer yet and the blueberries won't wait.  Have a good weekend!

Tour de Fleece 2008 update

Let's see, I spun the singles for this last Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of last week and last night, and tonight, I plied.  I got about 300 yards.  The roving was the last of the Polwarth and kid mohair that I was going to use it for that shawl I dreamed up months ago but frankly, there isn't going to be enough.  it'll go into Stash until another project comes along.  I've still got boatloads of Cormo...

Never long enough

Hiya!  Did you miss me?  I had a wonderful time at my parents' cottage with my family.  It was pretty quiet.  I read, spun every day and almost finished knitting my sock - I just need to bind off.  Do you want to see where I was?

 

My parents built the cottage the summer I turned three so we've been coming up here for a while.  The level of the lake has been rising and we've been losing land to erosion so we had to put in a sea wall.  We used to have a nice little beach as you can see, not any more.  No, I don't sail - unless someone else is driving.  The catamaran is a blast to sail but a huge pain when you want to come about (turn around).  One time a certain member of my family managed to flip and got the mast stuck in the bottom of the lake.  Dad had to come rescue them.  Nope, not me.  I know the basics of sailing but I'm not confident enough in my abilities to go out on my own, at least not with the cat.  Give me a nice, small Sunfish and I'd be happier.

Some of my best memories are being up at the lake.  One summer, we spent the whole summer up there - Mom and us kids.  Dad came up for long weekends.  We'd pick wild blueberries, visit the gravel pit (trust me, it was fun), go mushroom hunting (for fun, not eating), go petosky hunting, swim, hunt for worms one day to fish the next... it was a wonderful way to spend summers.  My birthday is in August and when we were at the cottage, there were always kids up there to help me celebrate.  At home, I can't remember ever having a birthday party because everyone was on their end-of-summer trip.

I've joined up with the Tour de Fleece 2008 and I've been spinning every day.  I decided not to take David along so I spun the roving for my second Divine Melon sock while up north and plied it yesterday.  This will be the next yarn I use.  Sock #1 is longing for a mate.

I'm putting some of the roving I dyed two weeks ago up in my store tonight.  It's getting late so only some will be going up.  Here are a couple more I dyed but haven't posted about:

4 oz. of Merino/Tencel.  What do you think?  Pansies?  Purple Haze?  Grapes?

4 oz. of Superwash Merino.  Any name suggestions?  I really love this one.  The colors are very saturated, which is what I like.  The more color, the better.

Okay, gotta go stock the shelves.  'Night.

"Dappled Shade" - 4 oz. of Superwash Merino, cooked up on the crock pot. 

"HOT!" - 4 oz. of Superwash Merino, hand painted.  This is another one I'm tempted to keep myself.  It'll spin up into such a fun sock yarn, perfect for the dull, dreary days of winter.

I've got three more I dyed tonight: two hand painted and one in the crock pot.  I'm going to wait until after my vacation next week to put them up in the shop.  I'll be going to my parents' cottage in northern Michigan for the week where I'll spend the week with my family.  We all have my dad's sense of humor so I anticipate lots of laughing.  I've decided to join the Tour de Fleece 2008, which starts Saturday, for my second year so Owen and lots of fiber will be going with me, as well as my current sock-in-progress.  I'm trying to decide if David will be coming, too, so I can ply.  I've got him set up with the jumbo bobbin and flyer so I can ply without worrying about running out of room on the smaller bobbin.  I suppose I could wait until I got home to ply things up, but where's the fun in that?

It's a 3.5 hour drive so besides the necessary driving snackages, I'll be listening to "The Hobbit" on CD.  So aside from my butt getting tired of sitting that long, I probably won't notice that it's a freaking long drive.  Oh, and since gas is now so damned expensive, I'll be driving the entire way going 60mph.  I expect I'll be annoying the snot out of a lot of other drivers.  Too bad. 

I always forget that I need Saturday to unwind from the week, so while I didn't dye all weekend, I did get some roving dyed up.  I'm tempted to keep some of them for myself.  Like this one:

I'm not sure what I'm going to call it.  Seablue?  The Blues?  Not sure yet.  It's 4 oz. of Blue-faced Leicester dyed in the crock pot.

I'm calling this one "Eat Your Greens."  It's another one I'm tempted to keep.  4 oz. of Superwash Merino, hand-painted.

I also dyed up BFL in the "Ming" coloway, Merino/Tencel in "Calypso" and some Superwash Merino in reds/oranges/yellows that I apparently didn't take a picture of.  There's a sixth roving cooling in the crock pot that'll be ready tomorrow.

Saturday morning I picked sweet cherries.  Lots of sweet cherries.  Today I pitted about 4 or 5 pounds of them, sitting on the couch with an old towel over my lap, watching movies.  I got the clever idea to use a large paperclip, opened into an S-shape, to dig out the pits.  I learned that cherry juice, combined with the mordant that is the metal the paperclip is made of, dyes protein quite well, ie. my hand.

I can't speak for it's light-fastness, but it's fairly wash-fast, at least in the short term.  Soap doesn't work at all.  And judging by the stains on the cotton towel I just took out of the dryer, it dyes cellulose fibers, too.  Rather all-purpose, cherry juice.  Anyway, I'm not wild about sweet cherry jam, so they're all going into the freezer.  They'll be great in oatmeal this winter.  I should get 5 or 6 quarts from what I picked over the weekend.  I found some reusable plastic freezer containers.  My sister said she'd had very good luck using ziploc freezer bags and I may do that but I prefer to use reusable containers if I can.

Homemade tortillas

My first attempt.  They're pretty pitiful, aren't they.  They're only about 4 inches across - they're supposed to be 5 or 6 inches across but I just couldn't manage it.  Maybe my tortilla press isn't good enough.  Not a clue.  I only made a half batch which means I should have gotten 8 or 9 tortillas.  I only got 6.  They tasted fine but they weren't quite right.  Hopefully the next batch will be better.  I might try a rolling pin next time.

I haven't called the farm to confirm so I'm hoping I'll be picking sweet cherries Saturday morning.  Next to fresh raspberries, sweet cherries are my favorite fruit.  They're only available for a short time which I'm sure is one reason I love them so much.  If they were available year round, they'd be commonplace and they wouldn't be special.  Yummy!  I've got 4 1-quart freezer boxes so some will be feeding the freezer.  I hope I can find more boxes.  The canning section of my local grocery store had jars and canning paraphenalia but no reusable plastic freezer boxes.  If I can't find more, I'll have to rethink how and what I'm going to freeze.

Back in the saddle

Damn Typepad lost my post!  Now I have to try and recreate it.  There was swearing.

Anyway, so as I said the first time, I've been in a weird funk for a month or so now and I've badly neglected my store.  I'll be recifying that this weekend when I go on a dyeing binge.  I've got new dyes, some new colorways, and a boatload of roving.  Take a look at this:

From left to right:  1 lb. of BFL, 2 lbs. of Superwash Merino and 1 1/2 lb. of Merino/Tencel.  Dyeing Merino/Tencel will be a new experience for me and I'm very interested in seeing how it comes out.  I love the sheen the Tencel gives the roving.  I'm also going to try again handpainting the roving on plastic wrap, rolling it up and steaming it.  I can get longer color runs that way.  I'll be making a trip to Gordon Food Service for some monster rolls of plastic wrap.  (The juvenile teenage in me really wants to completely wrap someone's car with the monster roll of plastic wrap.  If you get up Saturday morning and find that your car was shrink wrapped during the night... um, it wasn't me.  Really.)  After I've restocked the store with roving, I'll start working on some of the large spindle boxes.  The little ones aren't selling very well but there seems to be more interest in the larger ones.  I think they're pretty cool myself but since I came up with the idea I suppose you can't really call me impartial.

It poured rain tonight, which made my veggies very happy.  They've gotten so big since I potted them up.  Oh, and I have a pepper!  It's a little tiny thing about half the size of a pencel eraser but it's definitely a pepper!  It's so darn cute.  Yay, the bees like my plants!  It's about time to tie up my tomatoes.  I'd normally use tomato cages but I waited too long and they're too big now to get the cages in place.

Oh, and in the picture above, yes, that's a glass of milk.  I love the stuff; there'll be no osteoporosis for me!  Milk, it does a body good.

I has yarn!

Approximately 350 yarns of soft angora/merino goodness.  This picture makes it look brown.  It's not.  It's more purple and pink but the merino is black and that saddens the other colors quite a bit.  That and my camera's wonky.  What am I going to do with this lovely softness?  Not a clue.  It's between a fingering and sport weight.  What can you make with 350 yards of fingering/sport weight yarn?  It would have to be something that won't take a lot of abuse.  Oh, and I'm not a scarf person.  (So many people just put their hands down.)  Think I should buy another 4 ounces?  700 yards will be more useful.  Any suggestions?  I'm open.

Is it possible that I'm the world's slowest knitter?  It seems to take me forever to finish something.  Still, I did turn the heel and I like knitting k2p2 rib so in theory, I should be moving right along on this sucker.  In theory.  Sorry the picture's lousy.  Without a sock blocker, the ribbing wouldn't lay down and behave so I could get a decent shot.  Of course, with the ribbing misbehaving, you can't see the pathetic excuse for a short-row heel.  I blame lack of practice.  Would someone please take pity on me and show me how to knit a heel flap and gusset on a toe-up sock?  For some reason, when I read directions for said heel, it sounds like Charlie Brown listening to an adult talking, "Wahwah wah wah wah."  Short rows were much easier to grasp.

I've finally come to the conclusion that I'm not going to do rubberstamping any more and I need to get rid of my stamping stuff to make room for my current obsession...um... hobby.  Now that I've made that decision, I'm trying to decide between one big garage-type sale or listing everything separately on Craig's List.  The sad reality is a) I just want to be rid of the space-hogging stuff and b) I'm not made of money.  Two ideas that don't necessarily play well together.  I want/need a chest freezer for all the summer goodness I plan on putting up but, well, money doesn't grow on trees.  I could probably get more for things if I list them separately but it will take much longer and be much more work that way.  If I list a big sale, I can (hopefully) get rid of a lot of stuff all at once, and believe me, I have a lot of stuff.  Frankly, I'm leaning toward expedience.  Hopefully the sales will be enough for the new freezer.  Now I just need to find an open Saturday.  And space in the basement.