So many hobbies!

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.

My to-do list for Friday turned into this.  After work, I went to Lowe's to pick up pots, potting soil, some flowers for my window box and some basil.  As they were loading the many bags of soil in my car I watched the back end sink lower and lower.  I wasn't planning on planting Friday night but there was no way I was going to drive around over the weekend with that much weight in the trunk.  I spent nearly 2 1/2 hours working out of the trunk of my car to fill pots and plant plants - the bags of dirt were much too heavy for me to lift out so I just ripped holes and scooped.  I am definitely feeling my back today.  But, everything got planted.  Then, Friday night we had a huge rain storm that flattened the two small tomatoes and one of my peppers.  Figures.  I've still got one more pepper left and one of the big tomatoes so I guess it's back to Lowe's for another large pot. 

After the veggies, I planted the window box.  I'm not terribly fond of petunias but I just love the little baby petunias.  These will spill over the side of the box as they grow.  The yellow one one on the right I bought today along with another basil.  You can't have too much basil, right?  I'm going to make some pesto this summer.  Mmmm, pesto!

I washed the last of the llama today and did a bit of dyeing - some yarn and a length of roving.  I'll have pictures of the dyeing later in the week.   Until then, I just can't resist sharing another picture of Seli when she looks like this:

A wee spindled skein

Spindle plied at Spin Night tonight.  This is just the first skein - there's more left on my TP bobbins.  It hasn't been washed yet and I'm going to have to whack the heck out of it to even out the twist.  How the heck do you get an even ply with a spindle?  It's easy on a wheel, you just treadle the same number of times per length of yarn.  I need to do some reading on spindle plying.

I did a little dyeing over the weekend.  I think I'm going to name it "Patsy" after King Arthur's "horse" in Monty Python's Holy Grail... that is unless someone has a better suggestion.  "Fruity Pebbles" keeps popping in to my head.  Have I mentioned yet that I stink at coming up with names for my wool?   Now I'm thinking "Carlos" but that's probably because I'm listening to Carlos Santana on the radio.  I think it's time to go to bed now.  (On a side note, don't my photos look much better now that I've switched to a gray background?)

More yarn from class

This one I think I'll call Grape Harvest.  It's more sport-weight Superwash Merino sock yarn.  I tried colors outside of my comfort zone again and I wasn't too sure if I liked the results.  The more I look at them though, the more I like them.

These skeins I think are my second favorites.  I haven't come up with a name yet.  The yarn is 80% baby alpaca/20% silk lace-weight.  Each skein is 400 yards.  My thinking was the bottom two skeins would make up the body of a shawl and the variegated blue at the top would be the border.  I've got a total of 1200 yards so I should have plenty.  This yarn is soft and lovely and just may induce me to try my hand at a lace shawl.

My Sweet Chocolate peppers have sprouted!  I'm so excited!  I ended up buying a germination mat and it worked perfectly.  I was going to put the seeds on top of the fridge but apparently my fridge is too efficient and it's not warm on top.  The sprouts already have tiny little green leaves showing.  I wish I could show you but my camera doesn't have a macro lens.  Tomorrow I'm planting the tomatoes.  I'm already planning what I'll grow at my little farm when I get there:  which fruit and nut trees I'll plant, which of the small fruits (blueberries, raspberries, currants...), veggies.  At least I know to only plant one zuchini.  If you're not careful with zuchini plants, before you know it, you'll be up to your ears in zuchini and you'll be desparately trying to foist them off on all your friends and coworkers.  Soon people will start to avoid you and you'll lose all your friends until a good frost finally kills the plants.  Trust me, you don't want to be that person.  Unless you have a big family, believe me when I tell you you will only need one zuchini plant.  Think long and carefully before you decide to plant two of them.  If you're interested, I have a great recipe for zuchini bread. 

Dyeing with Ellen

Oh, people!  I'm pretty sure I'll be adding handpainted yarn to my store in the near future.  Handpainting yarn was FUN!  Ellen Minard (from Half-Pint Farms in Vermont) was a wonderful teacher and I learned so much from her and my fellow students.  I just wish I'd brought my camera to class.  I'm kicking myself now that I didn't.  The best part of being in a class with others is seeing what colors they choose.  I find myself picking mostly the same colors and when I started using colors I saw others using, I made yarn I loved. 

From Sybil, I borrowed her colors of rust, pumpkin and charcoal and added pine green to liven things up and make the colorway my own.  I love, love, love this yarn and I can't wait to make myself a pair of socks.

These skeins used cherry, toffee and mountain aqua.  Where they combined, I got purple and a lovely green.  I haven't decided how much I like this one for myself.  I was trying to move away from my usual colors.  It's hard to get an idea of how something skeined will look once it's knitted up.  It's a keeper for potential sale yarns, though.  I have more yarn that I dyed today but it's drying.  I'll try and post more pictures tomorrow.

I highly recommend taking a class, or classes, in your chosen interest.  You learn so much not only from the instructor, but from your fellow students.  This weekend's class was hosted by Artisan Knitworks in Grosse Pointe Park, MI.  It was an hour's drive for me (gas prices - Yikes!) but the store is beautiful, the owners extremely nice and helpful and they fed us, which really raises the bar in my opinion.  They brought in bagels from my favorite bakery (Brueggers) for breakfast and had lunch catered.  There were a certain number of skeins that were included in the materials fee and they had lots of extra yarn of different kinds that they sold to us for wholesale.  I, of course, ended up spending more than I'd planned but I'm so happy with how my yarn turned out.  I will definitely take classes from Artisan Knitworks again.

New roving

This one is very close to Calypso.  The purple has more red in it and the yellow is more gold.  I'm not sure if I'm going to put it up for sale or spin it then post it.

This is BFL roving in Black Raspberry.  It's another one-of-a-kind crockpot experiment.  I like how it turned out except there's a bit more black than I wanted.  This will make a beautiful yarn.  It'll be in the store tomorrow.

I'm afraid I'm not very exciting tonight.  I have the cold of the week and I'm not feeling very witty.  The lastest snow storm has started and I'm trying to ignore it.  I suppose it's fortunate that I'm sick and won't be going to work tomorrow.  I'm just going to sit inside with all the blinds down and wait for it to melt.  When I'm not sleeping tomorrow, I'll be watching movies that take place during the summer.  It's got to come around eventually.

Proto shawl

I didn't get as much dyeing done this weekend as I'd planned.  I spent most of the time spinning this.  It's almost 200 yards of Polwarth/kid mohair for my shawl.  I doubt this is enough but I don't know how much I need.  I've never designed a shawl before - or knit one for that matter.  I suppose I should start with the measurements of the shawl (right now, it's just a sketch on a piece of paper) and then knit a swatch to determine gauge and how much yarn is used in a 4-inch square swatch.  Once I have the amount of yarn used in a 4-inch swatch and the total area in inches that the shawl covers, I should be able to determine the total yardage needed.  (Will that work, Yen?  You know how I am with story problems.)

So while I didn't dye as much wool as I'd planned, I did get some dyeing done and I've got some roving soaking.  I dyed up some Ming and a new colorway that may be a little too much like Calypso.  I dyed up a one-of-a-kind roving in the crockpot I'm calling Black Raspberry.  It's drying.  And, I cooked up this:

7.5 ounces of Merino/kid mohair.  Look at that shine!  This will be the border on my shawl.  After I spin it that is.  I'm loving the colors and I can't wait to spin it up.  (Speaking of spinning, tomorrow is Spin Night so I may not post tomorrow.  It depends on when I get home and how tired I am.)

The weekend is never long enough.  In a couple of weeks, I'm taking a 4-day weekend and I am SO looking forward to it.  I should have all of my shawl yarn spun by then and I can spend some concentrated time knitting.  Does anyone remember how to determine the area of a triangle?  I'm sure there's a formula...   

Quickie post

It's going to take me a while to upload to my store so tonight... a little eye candy:

Chocolate Hearts

Refreshing

Clown Pants

Seaside (this one's my favorite)

This is a better picture of the Spring's Coming yarn than the one I posted earlier.