So many hobbies!

Experiment

 

Val introduced me to another dyeing method:  dried pigment dyeing.  She wrote up a little tutorial for me and I tried it Monday night.  The first thing I learned was I used WAY too much dye - I was rinsing and rinsing for a looong time.  A little goes a very long way.  Also, next time I won't use so many colors.  Aside from that, I think it turned out pretty well.  I like the intensity of the blue.  The fiber is BFL, by the way.

 

This is the second colorway for my next shawl.  It's a Merino/bamboo blend in the Red Maples colorway from Winterhaven Fiber Farm.  I've never spun this combination of fibers before.  It's going to be gorgeous.  I think I picked this one up at the Northern Michigan Lamb & Wool Festival last October. 

Next week I'm on vacation so you won't hear from me until Sunday the 8th.  Have a good week everyone.

Squishy goodness!

 

That's 525 yard/8 ounces of yummy, squishy goodness!  It's always a surprise how roving translates into yarn.  The roving was yellow with good touches of orange but the yarn looks more orange with touches of yellow.  Love!

 

The color is more true in the top photo but this one gives nice detail.  Try not to notice the embarassing changes in gauge.  I love how washing makes the yarn bloom.

 

I'm starting to keep records in a notebook of my spinning projects.  This sample card holds the singles on the left, in the middle is the unwashed 2-ply yarn and on the right is the washed 2-ply.  You can really see how the washed yarn has bloomed compared to the unwashed yarn.  It almost doubles in size.  I'll use this sample as a comparison when I'm spinning the other two colorways so all the yarn is the same gauge.

 

I'm on vacation all next week (going to lovely, warm Sanibel Island, Florida!) and this will be my knitting project:  my generic sock pattern.  I'm currently trying to decide if I'll be using 2.25mm or 2.5mm needles.  I'll be getting opinions in the fabric knitted from the 2.5mm needles from my knitting group tomorrow.   It seems too loose to me but I'm told I knit my socks too tightly so I don't really trust my feelings on this matter.  Tighter seems better to me.  It's warmer.

Sun and ice

 

Icicles are beautiful in the sun but they're very bad for your roof - too much potential for ice dams.  These are outside my livingroom window.  I really should go out back and break them off but they're so pretty.

 

This is what I worked on most of the weekend.  I'm in the middle of plying but I spun these pretty thin so there's a lot of yardage to ply.  I won't finish tonight.  I've already picked out the shawl I'm going to knit from this yarn and the two other colorways I have yet to spin up.  There are so many patterns to choose from, it's hard to decide on just one.  I now have far more patterns I want to make then I'll ever have time to make them, especially if I spin the yarn first.  So much to look forward to!

Word fun

Here is the Washington Post's Mensa Invitational which once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are the winners:

1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.

2. Ignoranus : A person who's both stupid and an asshole.

3. Intaxication : Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.

4.   Reintarnation : Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

5. Bozone ( n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

6. Foreploy : Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.

7. Giraffiti : Vandalism spray-painted very, very high

8. Sarchasm : The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.

9. Inoculatte : To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

10. Osteopornosis : A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)

11. Karmageddon : It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.

12. Decafalon (n.): The gruelling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

13. Glibido : All talk and no action.

14. Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

15. Arachnoleptic Fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.

16. Beelzebug (n.) : Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

17. Caterpallor ( n.): The colour you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you're eating.

18. Vowel movement : The inevitable verbal diarrhea that spews from ones' mouth when they have nothing significant to say.

The Washington Post has also published the winning submissions to its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words. And the winners are:

1. coffee , n. the person upon whom one coughs.

2. flabbergasted , adj. appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.

3. abdicate , v. to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

4 esplanade , v. to attempt an explanation while drunk.

5. willy-nilly , adj. impotent.

6. negligent , adj. absent-mindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown.

7. lymph , v. to walk with a lisp.

8. gargoyle , n. olive-flavoured mouthwash.

9. flatulence , n. emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.

10. balderdash , n. a rapidly receding hairline.

11. testicle , n. a humorous question on an exam.

12. rectitude , n. the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.

13. pokemon , n.. a Rastafarian proctologist.

14. oyster , n. a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.

15. Frisbeetarianism , n. the belief that, after death, the soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.

16. circumvent , n. an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men

Updates

 

Here's a more accurate shot of what I did Sunday.  Three movies' worth people!  Now I REALLY want a drum carder.

 

And for Val, an updated shot of the Marigold roving.  I'm the turtle on this one I'm afraid.

New fleece

 

The tips of hogget fleeces, the milk tips, are usually brittle so it's best to clip them off.  Plus, this wasn't a covered fleece and the tips are gummy.  I spent a good part of the day snipping tips.  The bin is almost full.  When it is, I'll start bundling and washing.

 

The lock on the left is unwashed.  The one on the right has been clipped and washed.  The color brightens a bit after washing but I don't thing the tip end will ever be really white.  The crimp is just lovely and the staple length, before trimming, ranges between 1.5 and 3.5 inches.

 

My other weekend project.  It ended up being about 220 yards of sport weight.

Blue ply

It makes it hard to have something bloggable when I'm reading a good book but I managed to start plying the singles I finished spinning New Year's Eve:

 

Spinning from a center-pull ball lets you spin up all your singles with no waste but you have to keep your thumb through the center or you get a tangled mess.  So when I get tired, or need to use the bathroom, I just stuff an old test tube (you could use a nostepinne if you had one) into the center and walk away.  I'll finish the plying tomorrow night. 

BTW, the book I'm reading is Dragon Bones by Patricia Briggs.  I thought I was done with reading high fantasy but I love how Briggs writes and after I read the first few pages when I was browzing on Amazon, I got pulled in.

Murphy's laughing at me

Naturally, after I bought a USB hub - which wasn't cheap - and a card reader, my camera dock is now downloading from the camera.  Murphy is an obnoxious twit who needs to be smacked into next week!  The only reason I'm keeping the new hub and card reader is because as soon as I return them, the dock will stop working.   You know:  Murphy.

 

I'm so very tired of snow but sometimes winter gives me things like this.  It's almost perfect and beautiful enough that I had to snap a shot before the light changed.

It's only the beginning of January and I've already dug into the roving I bought for winter spinning.  I thought the Marigold colorway was the perfect starting place.  It's a Merino/silk blend that reminds me of sunlight.

 

I'm going to admit that there's the possibility that I have a problem.  See, I have more than three bins full of wool, another fleece ready to be shipped off for processing, roving I've gotten back from the processor and roving purchased at various places.  And yet, with this excess of wool, I still bought a Cormo hogget fleece (the lamb's very first shearing).  I'm not entirely sure why except I love, love, love Cormo wool... and it wasn't very expensive... and I've never worked with a hogget fleece before... and did I mention it was Cormo?  Yeah, a sickness.  I know.  I'll have photos later this week.

Murphy strikes again

Murphy's Law #32:  Just when you get some money saved, something will happen to remove your savings.

My posts are going to be boring and photo-free for a while, I'm afraid.  My camera no longer downloads from its dock and my computer is old enough that I don't have a slot for a memory card.  This means I need a new camera (unless I can order a new dock... I'll have to check into that).  If the new camera is necessary, I hope I can find one with an automatic download because of the aforementioned lack of a memory card slot.  While buying a new camera is pushing it, a new computer is out of the question.

It's too bad the camera dock crapped out on me:  I have a beautiful photo of the snow-covered spruce in my backyard.  We got dumped on again over the weekend - I am completely, totally, 100% over snow... and winter.  I haven't heard the official count but the railings on my back deck have 7 or 8 inches of snow piled on them.  Our spinning guild had its monthly meeting this past Saturday and only a fraction of our usual members showed up.  Personally, I didn't think the driving was particularly bad.

Thanks to Val, I figured out how to change the language on my iPod back to English, which makes it much easier to work.  And thanks to friend Alice, I figured out how to upload music to said iPod.  Various people had told me you could use the USB port in your printer to download.  Unfortunately, that doesn't work for me, although I can use that port to charge my iPod.  Once I was plugged into the USB port in the back of my computer - and had downloaded a current copy of iTunes - things went much more smoothly.  Now I need to figure out how to upload photos.

Does anyone have any suggestions for a decent digital camera that also has a decent price?

The new baby

 

My new Forrester spindle.  Isn't it gorgeous?  A Christmas gift from my parents.  I haven't told them yet that they bought it for me.  Christmas money is a lovely thing.  Thanks, Mom and Dad!

 

I haven't had much time to play with it but it seems to spin nicely although not as long as I'd like.  Still, it weighs less than an ounce and the whorl is less that 3 inches wide so I guess I can't expect a marathon spin.

My other new baby is an iPod Classic.  I have a small problem, however.  Somehow, I told the thing I speak some Asian language and now nothing is in English.  I have no idea what I did or how to fix it.  (What?  Embarassed?  Not me!)  Does anyone have any suggestions before I haul off to the iPod store in the mall?  I'm usually not this dense when it comes to electronic toys...