spaazlicious

New Home

2006-10-30T11:14:00.000-08:00

Okay, I am still working the kinks out, but please change your bookmarks for this site to:

http://www.lanasdelibelula.com/blog/

I still need to transfer my links and tweak the template, but no new posts will be placed here on blogspot. Old spaazlicious posts are over there, although I couldn't transfer the comments, so I look like an unlovéd loser. :)

I hope to see you there.

I don't know if I can place one of those redirect thingies that go ahead and change it automatically in your rss feeder--if anyone knows that I can and how, please holla at your girl here.

The New ANTIcraft makes me want to learn crochet,

2006-10-29T19:21:00.000-08:00

nay, NEED to learn crochet.

This is the End, well pretty much. Mostly anyway. I think.

2006-10-26T12:07:00.000-07:00

The Rogue is done.

I was disappointed with it because I was a dumb@ss and didn't listen to whoever it was (I think it was Jessimuhka, but I've gone back through my comments and couldn't find exactly) who said to make everything longer. Being such a schmartypantz I looked at the schematic and measured myself and said, "nah, that'll be fine."

But perhaps the schematic included the length of the hems because when I sewed it all together and tried it on pre-hem stitching, the length WAS perfect, WITH the hems out. When I sewed the hems up, it was about two inches too short. D'oh.

The lack of the length in the body wasn't crucial, it does hit at a fairly flattering spot, which I think can be tricky in something so slumptastic as a sweatshirt, but I cannot stand to have my knobby wristbones showing under a sweater sleeve gap, it looks freakish. Unlike our friend the male platypus, my offensive poisonous spines are in my forelegs and I prefer to keep them covered when I'm cold.

I contemplated cutting the sleeves around the elbow, knitting the extra length and then grafting it back. But the prospect of dealing with the seam...I wussed out. I ended up just blocking the crap out of it.

Which makes the arms appear thinner, and as I wear it and my body kind of humidifies it and I move around the sleeves sneak back up...but it is still a comfortable compromise I can live with. Although you'll see a blocked those bad boys out unevenly. Oops.

'Scuse me while I bust a move.

This here's a tale for all the fellas
Try to do what those ladies tell us
Get shot down cause you're overzealous
Play hard to get an' females get jealous

A chick walks by you wish you could sex her
But you're standin on the wall like you was Poindexter

Says she wanna dance cus she likes the groove
So come on fatso and just bust a move

If you want it baby you've got it...
If you want it baby you've got it...
Just bust a move!

You're on a mission and you're wishin'
someone could cure your lonely condition
You're lookin for love in all the wrong places

No fine girls just ugly faces

My gauge changed between swatching and actual knitting, from the requisite 4.5 sts/in to 5 sts/in, which isn't huge, but did snug it in a bit. The sleeves might have fit better I suppose had I had that extra couple of stitches at the chest and shoulders. My row gauge was still right on so I didn't fuss about it.

I still have 204 yards/186.5 meters (3.2 oz/90.7 grams) left of the 1276 yards/1166.8 meters I spun up for the project. My Rogue is light and skooshy and warm and weighs 14.8 oz/419.5 grams. Who says that knit sweatshirts have to be heavy?
It is possible to get light lofty yarn from top!

The End of the Spaazlicious Road?

So I have finally done the thing which I started this blog to document nearly three years ago, the spinning and knitting of the Rogue.

I must say, I got a little distracted and didn't document it very well. ;)

I'm not going to stop blogging, I like it. Nick likes it. My family likes it. But I think I'm going to move it over to my poor abandoned wordpress shop blog. I never really gave that thing a chance, and so much of what I talk about here I wanted to talk about there, but didn't want to double post. And there was some stuff here I wasn't sure I wanted to be associated with over there--flabgina anyone? But now that I've finished completed the goal of this blog, I'm ready to move on over. Well, not just yet. The shop blog is bare and blah and has no links, it definitely needs to be spiffed up first. I just wasn't sure how much I was going to take over there with me from Spaazlicious.

I chose this name on a whim. Did some searches and at that time no one had it, or any similar play on the Spaaz theme in its various spellings, so I signed up for blogger and slowly learned some html and other requisite bloggy skills. I have grown attached to it, but it is potentially offensive. Of course everything is potentially offensive, but I'm not sure if it's business appropriate, even in the casual world of this "hobby market." So after I move, should I go back to Tortuga? I can't just be Wendy--I'd feel like I was pretending to be one of the real Wendys, as silly as that sounds. Maybe I should take the moniker Mary-Kay has bestowed upon me, WendySpin. I think I'm also called Wendy Spaaz or Spaaz Wendy a few places.

Maybe I should just be Wendy Black and leave the alter ego identities to the superheroes.

Once upon a time...

2006-10-22T22:25:00.000-07:00

I was a blogger.

Just haven't been feeling it lately.

I think part of it is missing Pomona so much. How could I not miss this face?

A lot of you nice folks out there leave comments about how you think you could never foster dogs because you'd want to keep them all, but for almost every foster dog we've had, I've been able to feel a different, better fitting family for them.

Snowball wasn't one of them. He had some weird quirks that would have had him bouncing from home to home, but we loved him, we trusted him, we felt the purity of his joy in being alive. And he was happy here. Renting this relatively perfect (but dumpy little) place here in La Mesa means that we can't officially adopt another dog since we are limited to two. We get away with fostering because technically, they're temporary. We make sure our three dogs don't bark and bug the neighbors, and they don't call the city for enforcement. Happy neighborhood status quo.

We "failed" fostering with Snowball because he was so special, so unique, so perfectly imperfect for us; he fit right in. We were going to make his adoption official when we moved up north (still waiting on a transfer) but the cancer proved an impetus to make it official earlier. With the bone cancer and the specter of amputation, it looked like we might need to move from our second story home anyway. But he fell in the yard, we faced facts, looked at his pain and couldn't do it. He was a good boy and we miss him so much. That's never going to stop, just ease over time.

Pomona may have started out "boring," but once we discovered the key to her heart was in "walkies" she opened up and we could see and feel how unique and wonderful she is. When she was on the beach or in an open field she radiated joy, that pure happiness and love that Snowball used to glow with and it was almost like having him back--but a different set of quirks. ;)

I should have been honest with myself about how I felt. I wanted to keep her. But I couldn't shake my foster mentality and took her to the adoption appointment anyway, and she was of course adopted, being the best f&cking dog in the world that she is. And while I didn't want to leave her, it was too late. I'd messed up. There's no "backsies" on foster dogs unless the owners bounce them back out (which happens when things aren't working out, which would mean Pomona was not happy, which I do not want) and there was nothing to be done. I was stupid, I f&cked up. Me missing her, wanting to keep her, is just selfish. Her new Mommy is a good one, she would be a great mommy for any of the shy dogs we have at the kennel(and who Pomona beat hands down because of her beauty, winning personality, and stellarly stinky flatulence, I tell you, she was a Spaaz family dog through and through) and she'll be a good mommy to Pomona.

But it was kind of like losing the 'ball all over again, and kind of knocked the emotional wind out of me. And you know what an emotional windbag I am, right?

Anyway, we needed more room in the kennel that day so I brought home another foster dog, Snuggle:

He is a totally normal spaaz, turning two years old this month. He is boisterous and affectionate no matter where he is--although he is a greyhound, so he sleeps about twenty hours a day,

the boisterous part comes in the three minutes or so spent in a complicated greeting dance when we come home. Or playing with toys, he gives 'em hell.

He is a bit unique in two ways however:

He has a mohawk fur pattern.

And he has an outtie:

Which I have never seen on a dog. He's a good boy, we figure he'll be adopted next weekend.

Next post, coming soon:

Explication of my petty petrol-related peevishness
Actual knitting content--I've finished the Rogue and was really dissappointed.
I'll figure out how to use my fancy schmancy Photoshop CS2 to highlight the part of the pink Sherwood that's f'ed up, have an updated photo.
Maybe I'll gather up the UFOs I have and organise a finishing spree.
Or ripping spree, we'll see.

Eek!

2006-10-13T10:52:00.000-07:00

In case you've clicked over from Wendy's, I apologise for my pathetic tantrum in the post below. I'll post explanations later, but please know I'm not really a ranter. At least, not here. Anyway, if you were curious about how much yarn I actually used for my bicolor cardi, here it is:

85 grams of the contrast color--although I have not knit the collar yet, so I may yet have that maddening experience of breaking into a 100 gram skein for a yard or so of extra yarn. Given how much I knit with the other grams though, I think I won't.

Anyway, so call it 100 grams used of the "required" 200 grams called for in the pattern. If I use more, I will amend this post. This may prove the impetus to actually finish this.

Of the 600 grams "required" for the main color I used 343 grams.

I used the yarn called for in the pattern, Louet Gems Opal in Teal and Fern. The linked page is a page from the special order section of my shop, if you scroll down you can see the prices and put up amounts. You can see that this is a not inexpensive yarn (and I sell everything below the suggested retail price) so I think it's important to mention the huge gap in my actual usage, so people can maybe their iffy buffer amounts in the 50 gram put up, instead of the 100 gram skein put up, from their local Louet dealer. That way it won't hurt so much if you have to break into a new skein for a little bit.

Of course, everyone knits differently and has different risk-of-running-out comfort thresholds. And I don't mind the extra skeins since I really enjoyed working with the yarn and being superwash merino it's great for socks and baby stuff.
It will be used, eventually. Probably sooner rather than later.

But for those who are afraid of massive oddball stash, it's a thought to think on.

Here's a horrendous photo of the pieces laid out. It pretty much still looks like that, just crammed into a knitting basket.

I'm with the majority of posters in Wendy's comments, I would of course rather end up with too much than too little, so it's okay with me that padding appears to be standard practice. I would like to see the actual knit weight of the garment pictured though, as unrealistic as that is. I always buy extra yarn. I hate running out of yarn. So the persistent extra is really just in the irksome and odd category.

Pathetic

2006-10-07T23:05:00.000-07:00

Y'know you're pathetic when...

You take your foster dog to an adoption appointment and try to talk up any other dog but the one you brought, your precious girl, even though you know they'll be a good home.

As long as they remember the daily walkies.
You almost post a razzing nasty comment on someone's blog who's bragging about their fancy new hybrid and their supposedly fuel efficient mileage to say something like: "Diesel! B!TCH! Run with more torque, more efficiency; I can run biodiesel and you choke on your fucking fossilfuel dependent smarmy hybrid!" I'm sorry, but does any one else remember when the Prius had something like a topspeed of 70mph, cost $30,000, and was built out of an ECHO!?! Terrible crash test rating, and who names a car after a DIMINISHED REPRODUCTION?! We waited 18 months for our jetta wagon with a TDI engine, and I don't regret it at all. If you want to know more about the TDI, click here.
If you want to know more about breaking dependence on fossil fuel, click here. (BTW, I got home from our big bear weekend with over a third of a tank left) If you want to see a little bit of internet empathy in my pissiness, and click on some linky goodness that might get you all frustrated about the better engines on the market in Europe, click here.
You notice a gigantic mistake in your knitting, a mistake which destroys the symmetry of the project, run the stitches back down to fix it, reknit the stitches, realise you only ripped down to just right above the huge many-rowed mistake, run the stitches back down to below the mistake to actually fix it, reknit it...run triumphantly to the blog to post the pic of the mistake for a whole beliedat! moment and realise...that you'd posted a pic of the huge mistake before. And no one said anything.

What the f_ck is wrong with you people?!? You call yourself knitters!!!!?!!!

Y'all suck. You could have saved me from knitting something like six or so rows!!!
In case you don't know me well enough to know, here's a frickin' emoticon:

;)

Blogworthy Heights

2006-10-05T21:08:00.000-07:00

We went to Big Bear for the weekend (we is Nancy [the organiser], Heidi [the babybaker], Mary-Kay [the mover & shaker], Cristina [the bunmaster], Hilari [ze fickle mistress of ze mojo] and Yoly [the blogless] and me [whoever I am]). Check Nancy, Mary-Kay & esp. Heidi's blogs for piccies; apparently our public story is that we had way too much food and the two cars we packed were very full. No mention of the all weekend orgy, the breast exams, and the giggly topless pillow fights every hour on the half hour. I'm not sure why, since the cabin's cleaning crew has probably found and released the spa boy by now so no point in keeping secrets.

Anyway, needless to say, we had a fun weekend.

I brought three projects.

The Rogue. I'd had a funked up stitch count in the hood section and set it down for a while, but brought it along anyway. I just fudged it, I figured the stockinette stitch amount didn't matter too much, I think I ended up with the right amount, as seaming it I didn't have any puckering, and didn't have to ease too much.

So, I'm done!

Whaddya mean it still needs sleeves?

Anyway,I tried the three needle bind off and didn't like the really obvious seam. So I tried grafting it, and I didn't like the one stitch offset look it seemed to be creating, so I picked it back out and did the three needle bind off again. I'm hoping the dramatic seam look will fade with blocking and yarn blooming.

The entrelac scarf. Which I'm totally bored with now. It's good public knitdioting, but I've become enamored of Sherwood.

I brought sherwood, but didn't work on it.

The yarn is Classic Elite's pima silk, which is so soft, I love it. It seems a little pilly though.

Pomona has an appointment on Saturday. I'm both hoping they are wonderful and perfect for her, and hoping they are absolutely unsuitable and we get to keep her longer. I love watching her run, her happiness is so infectious, and I am loving how she makes a little bit more progress each day. She's started coming out onto the deck to look at us through the railing when we come home, which is big progress, and the other day she even stayed out long enough to sniff my hand and get pets before shooting back into the bedroom, which felt like huge progress.

Opera is not for Amateurs

2006-10-03T10:10:00.000-07:00

Please, any deity listening, please make it stop.

Updated: The noisy wobbly warbling has finally stopped. The neighorhood dogs and I are much relieved. I am going to feel horrible if it turns out that it was actually someone taking an hour and a half to drown to death in a bathtub.

Excessively Picturesque

2006-09-25T16:34:00.000-07:00

Pomona has convinced us she deserves to be let off leash, that the risk is outbalanced by the joy.

She has also convinced us that given no other more immediately tempting prospects, she will return to us with almost as much happiness on her face as that which is displayed as she's running away.

We had a very good dog beach day.

I've learned a new knitting technique--entrelac!

The scarf says "hello" to the choicer properties of San Diego county while enjoying a ride on a museum train.

The scarf is from a very simple pattern--I highly reccomend that if you are living in the San Diego area and have been meaning to learn the technique, sign up for Cathy's two hour class at Two Sisters and Ewe in La Mesa. It was only $15, and WAY more enjoyable than learning through one of those online tutorial thingummies. (I think I've had a link to one of those FOREVER, and just never got around to going through it. I'm glad I waited/procrastinated.)

I spun my own yarn for the scarf, a singles version of the yarn I spun up for dye-o-rama. I was trying for a roughly worsted weight yarn, and it's knitting up all right on US9s. I'm not too sure about my color choices and their distribution, but I'm reserving judgement and enjoying the knitting of it.

The real colors are something inbetween. Pretty accurate in the daredevil scarf shots.

It was a good excercise to take the different fibers (merino superwash, south african fine wool, silk, merino/tencel [50/50], mohair, and merino) and try to spin around the same gauge. In some parts, I failed miserably, there are laceweight bits and bulky bits. My "excuse" is that I waited until the last minute, spinning like a demon grabbing the random sections of color and fibers to make the 446 yards in three hours on Tuesday night, washing it and hanging it out to dry, winding it into a knitting ball for the Wednesday at noon class.

Please forgive all the photos, but I found it impossible to choose between them. I love all her happy postures in these pictures. She LOVES dog beach and we are so lucky to have this space available to us.

When we don't feel like driving the twelve miles over to Coronado Dog Beach, we walk a mile up to a local elementary school's very nice all fenced in baseball diamond. Because it's so much smaller than dog beach her running is also scaled down and we don't spend much time there (we also don't want to get caught, so shhhhh! don't tell anyone about our ninja dog fun).

Pomona is nearly a normal dog on these leash walks and off leash silly-dog adventures, so she has proven to be a really good influence, getting us off our butts and walking and running and talking in silly voices.

I am still working on the Rogue. I'm almost done with the hood, but somehow I ended up with an uneven stitch count between the markers and I've put it in a bit of a time-out while I revel in the glory of the new-to-me entrelac, which is a much more portable and tolerant of interruption project than the Rogue at this point.

Oops.

2006-09-13T21:49:00.000-07:00

I have stumbled into love with "The Office."

If you can't think why, start here.

So embarrassing, but true. And also loving My Name is Earl. So you know where I'll be the 21st.

Wandering along

2006-09-11T17:08:00.000-07:00

For some reason, I just don't feel very bloggy lately. Rogue has been knitting up quite quickly although I've made some dumkopf moves--like forgetting how to read a chart, even though Wilson thoughtfuly alternated the position of the row numbers from left to right to call attention to the need to read from alternating directions when knitting flat. Pretty minor though, just had to rip back the 18 rows I knit before I realised what an idiot I was.

So here's where I was at at 3ish today:

Someone has already made it very clear that they really really like this sweater.

And I'm loving my yarn. Lucky thing, that.

Spinning

I've been spinning up the merino/possum blend my Mom brought back from New Zealand for us. I'm hoping to make a 2 ply worsted weight to do something comfy and cabled for Nick. It is prepared very differently from the Louet merino/silk and I am having to focus on adapting my spinning process to the new goals and the very different fiber. You know how you get in a groove of spinning fine? It can be a bad and tedious thing.

I've joined the Handweavers Guild of America. I have yet to build a Navajo style loom and get to accomplishing my weaving resolution, but I'm interested in the COE programs for dyeing and spinning. We'll see how interested I am after the materials books come, eh?

Other Stuff

I love this kid's sweater from knitty: Sherwood. This is a stitch pattern from one of Barbara Walker's Treasuries and I'd actually photocopied it to start swatching it for maybe an edging of a little sweater I'm doing, but it didn't seem quite right. I love it like this.

Cute socks in the issue too.

Dog Stuff

Nope, nowhere near replacing my belovéd and much missed bedshark, but still kind of cute. ;p

Tahoe digs her.

Belu wishes she'd walk off a cliff but it means she's a little nicer to Tahoe around the house. You'd never guess how much she loves to bite him when they're out and about.

She still practices her ninja skills around the house though, sneaking up on unsuspecting yum-yums.

We've let Pomona offleash at a local fenced in park and she actually has a recall. She will come to me, bouncing with joy on her face. We won't be trying her in unfenced areas any time soon, but it makes me happy to see her squirreling around across the grass and then actually coming when called. Good girl.

Um

2006-09-01T10:05:00.000-07:00

I am a whopping 2.5" into the Rogue. Which makes for a very boring picture.

So, look! Pomona!

I had a seriously dumkopf day yesterday, starting the body of the Rogue 3 or 4 times and each time getting to about the seventh or eighth twisted stockinette round of the hem facing before discovering that I'd somehow twisted the stitches before joining...I have never done this by accident before, yet I did it three or four times yesterday (I'm vague on the exact number because of the repetitive wall v. head trauma).

(This is about how I felt. This picture is posed, I stuck her lip to her gums and took the pic.)

Here's the finished yarn, which varies from 9-11 wraps per inch (there are ten in the pic, but you can see there's room for one more) and knit up to 4.5 sts per inch on a size US7:

The fiber is 80% merino/ 20% tussah silk in lichen colorway available by special order here under "Dyed Merino/Silk and Corriedale". (shameless plug)
Scroll down for the sticker shock, believe it or not that's well below Louet's retail price.

The fibers were all so aligned I spun with out predrafting or splitting the top, sometimes spinning from the fold. After all, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. ;p

I initially wanted a three ply; I had a thick and thin fatter single and paired it with two relatively consistent thinner singles, but I didn't dig it for the whole look of the Rogue.

So I spun two more plies like the first two plies and went for a more standard yarn. It's pretty skooshy and soft and the silk has a nice sheen and strength to it, so I'm very happy. I love knitting with it and it held up to the repeated ripping like a champ so I have high hopes for low incidence of future pilling.

Pomona gives it two paws up:

The pics I have in this post probably give the impression that she's left her shyness entirely behind. This is unfortunately not true.

She has moments, hours even where she forgets that we are Evil and will snuggle. The other day, I snuggled her for hours and she eventually put her head on my chest while I was reading and I thought my heart would just burst out of my chest with happy contentment.

But she seems to have her fear hardwired in her brain.

If we let her, she would still just hide in corners all day, so I mess with her by moving her around from the couch to the bed, to another couch, moving her to cuddle and pet her and she loves her walkies most of all--she even wags her tail! For the first few minutes or so, anyway, then something makes her remember that she's terrified, but she still loves the walkies, on the whole, so I think it's good bonding, and breaks things up.

We're trying to give her nothing but positive experiences, positive associations, nothing but happiness...but it's hard, because the fear switch trips in her head so quickly.

Yet she shows perhaps some progress: if people are walking away from her, she shows interest and wants to follow them. She'll still shy and cringe if they reach to pet her, but at least she's showing an interest in something besides hiding, and she definitely enjoys walking with the whippets more than walking alone so that's a good sign too that she's becoming a little more engaged.
Although Belu bit her today, so that's not a help. B(tch.

It's funny as Pomona seems much less shy in the routine and clamor of the kennel. She likes going out, she likes being in a group of big dogs, sneaking up behind or from the side for pets as part of a group, going back in, sleeping in her crate, eating her food, chewin' rawhides...just one of the thirty. But she won't go to a home like that, content as she seems in the kennel environment, so hopefully we'll help her become a more confident dog, slowly slowly slowly overwriting the fear.

Enough about the darn dog already, yeah? Or at least, for this post anyway.

Monica had a question about the plying card and how it was held. It really isn't a necessary thing, just makes it all a bit easier keeping an even tension on the strands being plied and keeping track visually on the amount of twist. I think I became fixated on the idea of it after browsing through Alden Amos' Big Book of Handspinning.

I hold it in my left hand and control the twist with my right:

(if I had thought about it, I would have flipped it over before stringing through the strands, I forgot I might take progress pics. It looks very brand-y. sorry.)

This may be opposite for other spinners. I spin "opposite" from most people, with my left hand being my forward hand, my right controlling the source. I surf goofy too. This was recently a topic on one of the lists, so I know I'm not alone, but I thought I'd clarify for those who might be looking at it and thinking, "wait, am I spinning with my hands the wrong way?" No. You're not. As long as you're getting yarn you are happy with and your hands are comfy in whatever positions you put them in (heh, heh) you are doing it just fine.

If you have your wheel adjusted just right, with the right ratio and adjusting the takeup so it pulls in at the right rate, you don't even need to hold the yarn while plying, you can just treadle and use that free hand to hold your drink. Wheeeeeee!

It's good to stop and check your twist every now and then, whether you're holding the plies or not, just to be sure you've put in the right amount of twist and the yarn is balanced. I have a tendency to tweak and tweak the adjustments on my wheel and treadle like mad, and occasionally have to pull sections back out to add more twist or let the twist run up more because I got a lil carried away.

Progress

2006-08-27T21:39:00.000-07:00

We've also taught her to get up on the couch. She's not ready to go to a new home 'til we've taught her to tip over the garbage bin and greet us unabashedly at the door, so we still have work to do.

My lazy kate only has three spikes, so the fourth bobbin is on the regular flyer and propped up while I ply on the jumbo flyer. I'm using one of those crappy club cards hole-punched at home as a jury-rigged ply-guide--it definitely makes it even and easy.

Let it not be said...

2006-08-19T23:58:00.000-07:00

that we do not feed our foster dogs.

Seriously, isn't even her vein-y belly beautiful?

She's still supershy. She still blossoms on leash. She has good days and bad days. Her housetraining is beautiful and solid when the door to the outside world is open. This is a rare and wonderful thing.

In the meantime, I'm on the fourth bobbin of a four ply worsted weight. Fingers crossed, it'll be the majority of the Rogue. Wheeeeee!

Renfaire! and fosterdog pics

2006-08-13T09:44:00.000-07:00

Last weekend Hilari, Heidi, Nancy, Cristina and I went to the San Diego RenFaire.

It was my first one, so I wasn't sure exactly what to expect and didn't dress up, but totally worth the price of admission and worth checking out was the the Gypsy Trading Post with Heather Seevers (under a Ren alias of Helena) and the awesome jewelry that makes me wish I was getting married all over again and Julia (aka Natasha) and her handpainted fibers and handspun.

I bought one of Heather's low whirl drop spindles and 2.6 oz. "silky merino" (I gather it is merino that has been stretched like Optim. I have felt Optim and was unimpressed, but it was in yarn form. This "silky merino" is awesome. It does look like a silk blend. When you "break" the roving for spinning, it does that crazy static poof that silk does, and it is soft and fine and slippery) cochineal dyed dark pinky purple, and the exhaust bath pink. Very reasonably priced, my total was something like $15.50 for both spindle and roving. Steal.

They both need etsy sites.

There were lots of examples of sunscreen application vs. a combo of jiggly wiggly mobile flesh & bright San Diego sun:

but I only saw one of these:

on this:

There are a lot more pictures on flickr, but unfortunately, quite a few are duplicates as I uploaded everything, then went back and cleaned some up and cropping them, but when I uploaded the new & improved ones they just added them in, not replaced them and to delete the first ones seems kind of "meh, pita." I had a lot of fun, although the Faire distinctly lacked gigantic turkey legs or homebrewed mead.

There was a preponderance of pickles in prows (one is too many). I didn't take that linked piccie, it's from here and the first poster has some good pics. Turned out (according to the schedule they gave us but I didn't bother to look at) we left right before the greyhound coursing. D'oh!

Another vendor was The Village Blocksmith, so I totally know what I'm getting the Button Jr. for his or her third birthday. Rockin' blocks, man.

My favorite amidst the performers was the Rat Races, very cool interaction with the kids, and although their booth got a little smelly as the day wore on, it was quite a fun show as the rats jammed through the obstacle course:

I think this is my favorite pic of the day:

as it felt straight from Hell's Grannies.

Boring Foster Dog Update

Pomona the new foster dog is slowly coming out of her shell and being less boring.

We move her onto the bed or sofa to pet her and just hang out while close, otherwise she will just stay in a corner.

She is probably the most internalised shy dog we've ever met, not interested in the whippets, not really interested in us.

We will make her love us.

Ve haff vays.

De-stashing! Yarn and Roving

2006-08-12T16:19:00.000-07:00

Mary-Kay is destashing for a move to CO and is selling her stuff at screaming cheap prices, there's some great roving and yarn here.
Like a virtual garage sale! With better stuff.
And you don't have to paw through a big grubby box hoping to find that cool rare book...and run into somebody's old raggedy panties...

Apropos of Nothing

2006-08-10T12:01:00.000-07:00

Do not click this if you are:
A) at work
B) have children or fundies hanging over your shoulders watching you surf "teh internets"

Hit pause until the status bar has loaded it completely.
Cut and paste into your browser.

http://www.dailymotion.com/blog/video/431648?key=fzkyzjudxyf9c7z3jdbtk60mql3vksr89adc00na&play=1&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tastelikepizza.com%2Findex.php%3Fitemid%3D651

I just love the self confidence. And yeah, how does she do it?!?

Rules of Thumb

2006-08-06T07:39:00.000-07:00

If a dog has a choice between linoleum and carpet to have an "accident" upon, they will choose carpet.

If one of the reasons you fell in love with your husband was his keen sense of observation and quick thinking, he will blearily step in the poo on the carpet and leave Family Circus style tracks EVERYWHERE before he leaves for work in the morning. And when you call him to rip him a new one, the first thing out of his mouth will be, "I think I stepped in poop in the yard last night--there's poop in my car!" Like, eeeeeeew! The smelly tragedy of poop in the car! Honey, hold me!

If you call a foster dog "boring" they will poop in your house.
(accidents happen--I should have got up and taken her down to the yard [we had taken everyone down at midnight as well] and to be honest, the poop would have been really easily picked up if it hadn't been for Mr. Oblivious Handsome Pantz grinding it into the carpet, it was one of those lovely poos that give you confidence in your dog's diet and health otherwise)

If you get all outraged about knitwear, life will give you something to bitch about. (still, relatively minor, compared to real troubles in the world but I'm hoping this is my ration for the day).

Hate You Like a Redheaded Stepchild

2006-08-05T19:30:00.000-07:00

(all right, all right, the original phrase is "Beat you like a redheaded stepchild," but let's face it, it's utterly charming either way--who doesn't enjoy spite directed at the melanin-impaired/pigmentally-challenged?)

I've received my copy of the latest Interweave Knits. And I think IK has declared all out war on the redhead:

(please forgive the crappy scans)

If their thirst to make her look like an utter jackass wasn't slaked by the goofy skirt (sorry Anne, loved the cardi! not diggin' the skirt!) it must be quenched by those hideous scrunchy flashback suedey boots.

But no.
The blight of silly accessories continues, with the shame of a Silly Hat and the dreaded underclothing peekaboo effect (think Louet and the Nude Bra Famine of 2005).

IK: Oh sweetie, we're sorry, we're sorry, look, here's something pretty for you--the perfect color for your skintone, so lovely, so delicate, a sweet lace top...

IK:Oh, didn't we mention that the hem length of body and sleeves would totally accentuate your short torso and make you look like Biliousness Personified?

Bwahahahahahahaha!

And like so many domestic violence scenarios, the giving with one hand, pinching/burning/whipping with an electric cord with the other hand continues...

Again with the not-flattering, making her look like Starsky's love-child with a SHAWL COLLAR cardigan with KNITTED BELT and some random wooden toggle and widening horizontal rib and hippiness at the hem... Two inches longer and it's straight from the seventies (okay, with the collar kind of flipped up and not completely shawled out, we're bordering on early eighties, and I did hear they're back.) Honestly, it looks comfy, and it is a cute pattern, but it's pretty half-assed for an apology.

And, as previously observed by Jessica, this.

(aside from the demonic embroidery I actually think it's pretty cool. also, how many references to Jessica can I get away with before this post seems like a total rip-off? Oh, too late? Really? Oops. Anyway, I rest my case. Everything IK puts The Redhead in is Fug™.)

And since I still have some Bitch left in my account, I'll spend it on this:

Let's just say I'm glad my head was shaved before I saw this, otherwise I'd be having nightmares of my hair trying to eat my head too.

(The pattern's really cute though. And, honestly, I think I recognise the signs of Someone Trying To Grow Out Their Hair and in the grips of one of the many and perpetual accompanying "awkward phases." My hair makes an utterly uncharming mullet at six months growth. I fit right in at Parkway Plaza.)

On a final note:

You #$*¥%ers! Stop adopting our #^@$%ing foster dogs so fast! We only got to have Teak for maybe a week and then we were making serious progress with Hoth, but NOOOoooooooOOOOOooo, now he's gone to a great home in Murrieta.

And now we have Pomona, who's seriously cute but seriously boring, as dogs go.

And I can't find the #$(*#@ USB cord for the camera to show her sweet Orange Blossom Honey colored face to the world, so maybe that's why I'm Waxin' a Lil Wroth.

Stupid efficient adoptions matching. Stupid me for losing the USB cord. Grumble. Grumble. Grumble...

Shameless Displays of Indulgence

2006-07-30T23:21:00.000-07:00

Considering Hoth was afraid of the camera just a week ago, I think he's made excellent progress in the mellowing department. He no longer worries about the big scary clicking whirring flashing black thing and lets it get right...up...close:

Now, if he could keep his @ss a little farther from our pillows, I'd be happier.

I have no interesting knitting. I knit a pumpkin hat, but the leaves I knit looked crappy and while I could have sworn that there was a corkscrew icord in one of my books, I couldn't find it. Also, I have not posted the three hats I made and they were supposed to be there tomorrow. Not gonna happen. I hope other well meaning knitters were not as disorganised as I.

I took scissors to my hair, and once again, too late, remembered that I suck at cutting my own hair. I don't really like going to the shop to get my hair cut either, so when I went today I had the barber cut it down to a quarter inch. That way I can go a couple months before having to go again. I am brilliant. Now the dogs look like shaggy hippies next to me and I know a couple things I didn't really know before:

My hair grows in odd directions in sections and this is pretty apparent when it's this short
I am not Natalie Portman, or Demi Moore. I don't look boldly cute nearly bald--although if the "louse free" look comes into vogue, I'm ready.

Well, off to do some one armed push ups.
(truth be told, I always have a hard time believing the person in the mirrror is me, so despite the blogging, I'm not fussed about my hair. I love rubbing it. It feels good.

And I am really regretting not going for some mid-90's hip-hop style and getting something razored into the back of my head, like "hi Nick!")

The New Hotness

2006-07-23T17:03:00.000-07:00

Say hello to our newest foster dog, Hoth:

He's just turned three years old, has bad teeth, a bit shy, a little freaked by men, takes thyroid medication, has to eat a special fish & potato diet because of allergies and is the tallest dog we've ever fostered. He may be here awhile (and that's all right). While he's no Snowball, (;P) he's a unique mookie bear and very good about not peeing in the house and we lub him vewwy vewwy much.

We're going to teach him to be confident and chill.

Speaking of chill, the irony isn't lost on me that he's named for an ice planet in a galaxy far, far away a long time ago. (Dogs that come in in groups are named for themes. Someone was in a Star Wars mood when he first came in. We also had a Nabu and an Endor that I can remember.) It's very hot here. It's pretty hot everywhere though, and setting records for it, so, enough said. Weather chat is for neighbors and elevators.

I've been spinning, knitting, and goofing off.

Spinning and knitting, color synchronicity.

I've been doing some dyeing too, pics later.

I've been getting really excited about the Louet Victoria--originally labeled the S95, it was renamed after this cutie patootie:

I especially like this bit:

Just as my grand child the prototype weighted 3,5 kg and measured about 50 cm long. Folded, the S95 is still longer than Victoria, my grand child, when she folds herself.

written by Jan Louet.

I like my Lendrum, but I don't love it.

While its endless range of adjustments and accessories are part of a selling point, they're also a pain in the @ss. They don't actually fit in the gigantic bag one buys to carry it in and it's heavier than many other wheels.

The Victoria is priced at a point below the Lendrum (I don't know that there's been an official suggested retail price, but they designed it be at the price level of the S75 or below and $550-$595 seems to be the magic number most bandied about as a retail price) and it's lighter and more compact than anything else on the market.

Anyway, I'll bet a lot of Lendrums are on the market used after this becomes available and widely tested. Mine might be.

Of course, Lendrum owners are a fierce gang, with a yahoo group and all...so who knows. It won't be available for shipping until November, but I've got dibs on an oak one. I'll be taking orders for the Victoria at my site, bag & shipping included for $525.

Click here for more shopariffic info.

Belu's posture telling Tahoe that she'll kick his butt six ways 'til Sunday if he says anything about the hat. anything, buddy, just try some smart lip.

Speaking of smart lip and stupid hats, I never should have said, "one a day fast" about the babyhats. We had visiting family and I've only finished one baby hat since my last post, and you can sort of see the second finished hat under the berry cabled hat on the arm of the sofa next to Hoth. The hat in progress next to the bobbin of handpainted Dorset is some odd skein Bisbee Sock Yarn.

I am maybe half done with a pumpkin hat made of a spare ball of Jaegar Cadiz (50/50 silk/viscose blend) which I'll edge with single crochet green Noro Cash Iroha around the brim edge and use the green Noro to knit a twisting i-cord vine and leaves. Originally I cast on 42 stitches, but thought that would be too small, NICU sized, so I ripped it and now it's 70 stitches on size 4s and will be a pumpkin hat to fit a pumpkin head--a mother's silly hat revenge for a painful perineum. ;)

Or just a hat for a healthy, happy breastfed baby. Who knows.

Knitting, babies & b!tches

2006-07-16T20:21:00.000-07:00

Knitting

Last Monday night I finished my first pair of adult size socks.

I didn't kitchener the toe until Tuesday morning however, because I didn't have Jessica to hold my hand and talk me through it step by step for this one (unlike the first one, finished at the baseball game and she didn't actually hold my hand because that would have made kitchenering the toe even more tricky, but she did watch me and tell me exactly what to do so I just shut my brain off and followed her voice to HappyTidilyGraftedToe Town), but the knitty tutorial did all right. Not as pretty, but done.

Doing the second heel I realised that I have a "literacy issue." The heel flap instructions did not say "purl 1, slip 1" like I had remembered. Just "slip 1, purl across" like Stella had said in the comments. It does make a bit of visual difference, and feels a little different on, but not so much that I'm making a third sock.

Both socks were made with one skein of my dye-o-rama pal's yarn with a fair bit to spare, so I could make a matching pair if I was so inclined. I love the colors, but the polyamide content in this elann makes 'em a little crunchy feeling, so I know they'll wear like iron. (not a bad thing).

Pattern modifications: None, although I didn't knit as long a foot as specified as I have shorter feet. The "lovey lace" pattern was very easy, but kind of baggy. I guess I'm not as cankly as I think.

Knitting & Babies

Given the subscription numbers, it's highly unlikely that anyone reading here is unaware of Yarn Harlot's baby hat post(s). But just in case: (scroll down each entry for the pertinent bits) Original post here, baby hat Q & A here, Jeanne's mailing address posted here.

A big amen to the original post, and not just the maelstrom of issues surrounding breastfeeding but also the not-putting-acrylic-on-babies thing--if you've ever done a burn test on acrylic you'll know why the idea of it freaks me out.

Acrylic burns fast and hot, spreads and melts fast. Ingeo does the same.

Pure wool is self-extinguishing and flakes instead of melting. Wool also becomes warmer when wet, instead of stealing heat from the body when wet as cotton does. The market is now so large that the old "rough wool" is no excuse--there are wools out there softer than many of these unnatural yarns marketed for baby knitting. The only excuse out there against wool now might be the "easy care" issue, but I think it's more a different mindset. Washing our wool stuff doesn't seem any more of a PITA then doing laundry or dishes. Fill a sink/washer, let the item(s) soak for twenty minutes in the soapy water, drain, refill, soak, drain, lay it out to dry. Little increments of time. As I'm given to understand that everything is reduced to little icrements of time once the baby comes, I don't see what the big deal is. Although I can understand the One.More.Damn.Thing. complaint/viewpoint.

Anyway, superwash wool is out there and now, easily available. One caveat though is that the polymer it is coated with to keep it from felting does burn, but the self extinguishing properties of the wool still exist within it and it behaves in a burn test almost exactly like pure wool, but the flame spreads over the surface a little farther and extinguishes a fraction of a second later. Enough of a difference to tell a difference, but a small difference.

Cotton is not self extinguishing, but does not spread in such a scary fast flame as acrylic. But it will burn completely, with little orange glowing worms of flame spreading throughout the fiber unto powdery ash.

People generally don't smoke around kids any more, but still...just in case, and especially during barbecue season, please don't encase kids in petroleum products.

Anyway, my point, before I got distracted by setting samples on fire at the bathroom sink?

When I wind off sock yarn I often end up with mini-skeins. Baby hats, even knit in sock yarn, knit up incredibly fast, like one-a-day fast. And it's superwash merino, so they can wash it in the washer but it'll burn (almost exactly) like wool.

Never knit something without an eye toward its fiery destruction, I always say.

I haven't much of a clue about baby proportions (I am always blown away by how wee we all start out) but I think this cantaloupe is about the right size of a big-ish newborn noggin. Roughly 55 yards of the fingering weight, a cable pattern made up on the fly. I did do a rough sketch of it on paper, but the cable as knit had fewer crossings, not like you can really tell in the variegated yarn anyway.

Anyway, this is definitely a great way to use up project scraps as they really don't take much yardage, and being small and not laying in the lap, they're nice for summer knitting. They're also great for trying out stitch patterns, little wearable swatches.

B!tches

I thought I was getting better about missing Snowball, but in the last few weeks the grief has come back. Not the same crippling wave of it, but the futile stabbing pain of absence. The fresh reminder that I'll never get to rub my face in his fur and scratch him while he leans against my leg. That no one follows me around while I do house work and I'll never laugh at him doing his happy spins around the yard again. I thought I saw him in the kitchen about three weeks ago, coming in from the deck but it was just a combination of Tahoe, peripheral vision, and wishful forgetting.

And then I got an e-mail that this beautiful girl had to be put down because of osteosarcoma too.

I really thought I'd had a post on this blog about her, but I cannot seem to find it. She was at the center when we were fostering Jasper and I couldn't bring her home, but she was one of the ones that really made my day. We would hang out in the car for lunch, sometimes go to McDonald's (my lunch hour was before the breakfast cutoff time and I love the hash browns, and she liked the sausage mcmuffins, and I went back again just a month ago after not having gone since she was adopted and the lady at the drive-thru asked, "Where's Rosie?"), sometimes go to my house. I loved her. Her goofy smile and bounce made my day. For other people she would just stand there, but the way she bounced around for me and our happiness together made people say, "hey, that dog is cool," and put out the extra effort to draw her out, so she started being more affectionate with EVERYBODY--it's a not uncommon domino effect, and it's not something people would like to admit, but there is competition to be the dogs' FAVORITE person, the person they all go apesh!t for--and got adopted by a nice couple from Beverly Hills.

They had e-mailed me about six months ago to tell me about the cancer, but the e-mail saying she was gone, plus this inexplicable new wave of mourning for the Wallyball made me need another greyhound around.

I love my dogs. But there is something about taking a dog and bringing them home and watching them just open up, learn new things, become brave and confident, be silly, spread out, cause trouble...it's awesome, and I love it. It's probably just ego stroking, but I love how just a little extra effort with a dog can effect huge changes in their behavior, turn a shy dog into a happy bouncy goofy love-glutton.

Anyway, Monday we brought home Teak.

Long story short, she's an awesome little girl. She'd been a shivery nervous wreck at the kennel, but had a great time at our house, especially since there was a ten minute gap in adult human supervision and she kicked Belu's ass.

I'm sure Belu deserved it.

I came home and Belu had a scallion sized hematoma on her neck and a tooth/claw scrape on her side; a little table on the deck had been tipped over and a machete was buried point first into the deck a half inch or so. It must have been quite a little scuffle.

Belu likes to nip Tahoe when he gets excited when we come home--I think she tried this with Teak, and Teak showed her that this was unacceptable. She never broke the skin, just bruised her, which if you know how thin greyhound/whippet/italian greyhound skin is, you will be able to respect how amazingly well-tempered her bites were. Just fabulous. We weren't sure that Belu had learned her lesson, and Heidi said it was okay to bring her to the movie night that night; by the end of the evening the blood in the hematoma had been mostly reabsorbed and was almost undiscernible.

She decided on a policy of pretending Teak didn't exist, looking right past her, leaving her alone. This is amazing if you know our powermad little b!tch when she's at home.

The first day or so Teak was a little clingy. At one point I was walking in the house and stopped and she walked headfirst into my backside and I nearly cried with gratitude. Snowball used to do that all the time, and while I know we'll never have another dog like him, it was nice, this...I don't know what you'd call it. Anyway, I think I'm starting to sound pathetic and most people aren't reading this anyway as there are no pictures, so I'd better wrap it up.

She was adopted yesterday, and while I'm hoping it will be her perfect happy forever home, she'll always be welcome back here. So it was a short foster experience, but good balm for wounds all around. My SIL and nephews will be visiting this week, but next week we are bringing home another.

Yoghurt & Figs

2006-07-11T11:24:00.000-07:00

First off, go say happy birthday to Heidi.

(when come back bring pie)

Yoghurt

I'm not sure what else to say about the yoghurt, but here are some answers to questions posed in the comments and a bit of addenda.

The first batch I made was with a quart of whole milk and a 1/3 cup of the dry nonfat milk, rounded tablespoon of plain yoghurt (starter culture) and left it in the stove overnight. (instructions straight from google) It tasted great but was a bit thinner than storebought.

The second batch I tried the quart of skim milk, the cup of dry nonfat. Thicker, better.

This batch I've added some vanilla too at the higher heat stage and doubled the amounts. Vamos a ver.

However you make it, as long as you add a rounded tablespoon of plain yoghurt to be the starter culture at the lower heat stage (around 100ºF, higher heat would kill it) you will have as much active happy healthy bacteria as storebought, sans marketing, sans aspartame.

I have read that the less fat in the milk you use, the less thick your yoghurt will be. Makes sense to me. So you might have to choose. Also, for thicker, cheese style or "greek style" yoghurt you can layer some cheese cloth in a bowl, pour the yoghurt mixture (after its 6-8 hour incubation) into the bowl, gather the ends of the cloth and suspend it over the bowl in the fridge. Leave that overnight, and keep what's in the cheesecloth, do whatever to the whey.

Figs

I love figs. Dried, but especially fresh. There's really nothing you need to do to a fig to make it better, IMO.

But when we lived in Sacramento, there was a restaurant that started up in the doomed Shakey's pizza burned out space and when we went the first day or so after they had opened we had one of the best meals ever. We came back a week later and it was awful and apparently, that's how it stayed. Anyway, this fig thing is one of the foofy things we had. Quite easy to make.

The figs I used were even, perhaps, overripe. But it turned out all yummy and smoky-sweet all the same.

Turn on the broiler of your oven, and cover a cookie sheet with tinfoil.

Anyway, with a spoon, scoop out the the pink guts of the figs. Mix with an equal amount of chevre cheese.

Spoon the guts back into the centers of the figs.

Place upon cookie sheet. Stick cookie sheet in the oven, under the broiler for about ten minutes, or until the cheese and sugar in the figs have gone all melty and carmel-rific.

Dribble a bit of balsamic vinegar over it (or not) and you're done. Carefully plate 'em up as they'll be very skooshy. And hot.

Maybe they don't look all that sexy, but they're yummy. The goaty cheese and the carmelised sugars in the fig make it smokey an sweet, and a bit of balsamic vinegar lends an acid sweetness to cut the fatness of the flavor.

Next up:

Knitting, bitches & babies.

Happy Monday Morning

2006-07-10T08:54:00.000-07:00

Bit of surreal campy commercialism for you, dear?

(you'll want your sound on)

A more in-depth Yoghurty post tomorrow, I promise.

Mmm...breakfast.

2006-07-04T12:25:00.000-07:00

Red, white and blueberry.

Homemade yoghurt*, super easy!

Hope everyone has a yummy and safe 4th of July!

*combine 1 quart skim milk heated to just under scalding & 1 cup dry nonfat milk in a sterilised ovensafe bowl. Let cool to about 100, 110ºF before putting in a rounded tablespoon of plain yoghurt (from the store or a previous batch, whatever, you just need starter culture) and mix in well. Wrap in a shawl (or clean towel, whatever) and place inside the warm (but switched off) oven. Leave overnight, 6-8ish hours. The longer you leave it, the tarter it'll get so it depends on your taste.

Blood in the Water

2006-06-28T20:27:00.000-07:00

actually, just a mixture of madder and cochineal, a bit of fustic and cutch.

But on the paper towel, it looks quite like blood to me:

I overdyed a pound of shetland moorit to sample and love the "passionate brick" color it became; there was also a little hundred yard skein of superwash sport that went into the bath too and came out a nice flag-like red.

Unfortunately, I just can't seem to get the color captured right in this uggy weather which boils the life right out of my plants.

The indigo pot is enjoying this heat though.

I woke up half of my indigo vat mixture and put it into one of those dark "graniteware" enamel 16 qt stockpots that Target has in its stores for $12.99 and have been dipping it solar style.

I love the miracle of the green to blue, every time. I'd have Nick take pics, but he's too busy making faces and gagging.

Anyway, I added a bit more cochineal to the exhaust of the red dyepot and dropped in a pound of superwash yarn, one hank of sport, one hank of the fingering, just to see how much color I could get back out, hoping for a nice girly pink.

Not too bad.

I then dipped it in the indigo vat, hoping for a light overdye to get some sort of violet

(aiming for somethin' kind of like that below I suppose, which is a pound of superwash singles [acid dyed in the roving] to be plied into a chunky worsted weight)

but when I woke the vat up, I added more indigo, a little thiorea dioxide to "sharpen it" and speed up the whole oxygen reduction process of the new indigo plus a fair bit of heat on the stove and it was such a strong mix of heat and dyestuff I got straight up dark blue.

The linen and superwash I've been dropping in since moving it outside and depending on this fiendish heat have been less extreme, but I've not had to dip more than once so the colors are quite strong.

I've mordanted some superwash, lincoln locks, and linen, so I'll be doing little random experiments here and there. I feel some yellow coming on.

I dropped some linen & superwash in the pink exhaust and turned on the heat. I was getting a lovely almost hot pink, but I turned up the heat (got a little greedy to get all the color I could) and turned it up too much; there must have been enough madder to turn the tones to the brown side. Bummer. I now have a hundred yards of meaty color superwash and a light flesh tone linen. The difference between the two fibers is pretty stark. I should probably have a picture here. ;)

Hmmmm...look over there! What's that?

A messed up slipped stitch heel!

I admit, I misunderstood the directions, on the purlside when it said "purl 1, slip 1" I kept slipping it knitwise, since it didn't say slip purlwise. Yes, sometimes details need to be spelled out for me.

I wondered why it didn't look like the pattern pic, but I really like the look of it as is, despite its inflexibility. It doesn't feel right on the foot either, but I'm being stubborn and not ripping it.

After all, I'm sort of in the home stretch of sockage, right?

yeah, I'll keep telling myself that. This is definitely a good knitting in public pattern, very simple repeat.

A while back, Claire sent me some lovely orange and yellow merino/silk fiber, like squishy sunshine. I spun it into this:

roughly 13wpi, 2.4oz, 408 yards

I love the loftiness of it. I plied it very spaaztically, some parts are barely plied at all. I was originally thinking to make it into a lace scarf, but now, I'm thinking I might save it for a special colorwork project.

Happy colors.

I found this guy hanging out in my garden.

(click to view bigger piccies)

I'm going to turn him into a sock yarn colorway.

Whaddya think of "Ginger Mint Caterpillar" as a colorway name?

I never saw him after the photo shoot, so I haven't a clue what he turned into--I do hope a bird didn't eat him though.

Footnotes, clarifications

I didn't buy the fleece in the previous post--I wanted to buy it, but was a good girl, I still have roughly sixteen pounds of 3 greasy fleeces to spin up. (Eloise, the lincoln, the biocut merino). I did take names and contact info for posting a list later--and shopping, when I've made some room on my plate. ;)

I was also going to talk more about indigo, but y'know what? It's so cool it needs a post of its own. It's stinky but I love it. Wheeee!Peeee!

Apparently the heat is getting to all of us

2006-06-28T12:36:00.000-07:00

not exactly hot as Hell, but I'm working on gettin' there.

Imagine your local churches were having a sign war...

It should be fairly obvious that this is my heat-addled idea of a joke. If it isn't, here's your sign.

I'm never buying a fleece on eBay again!

2006-06-21T21:00:00.000-07:00

And not because of a bad experience, but because of a fabulous time at the Del Mar Fair fleece judging and there was an abundance of loveliness:

More photos here & experience notes on flickr.

Coming soon, knitting, spinning, dyeing. Shocker.

OMG!¹³

2006-06-18T02:08:00.000-07:00

I did a vanity Google (I have a ten year h.s. anniversary this July, after all) and there's a friggin' porn star with my name.

Also an equestrian. An interior designer. A draft horse. A dental hygiene instructor. A screen printing artist. A math Ph.D of OSU at NDSU. Some lady soliciting prayers on beliefnet. A public art student. A lovely lady inmate lookin' for love. A B.A. in psychology teaching Hatha Yoga in CO. A site that makes me wish I knew Czech. (NSFW, assuming your work filter knows filthy[?] czech). A trailer park fire victim.

None of these are me. Whew!

Who knew a made up anglo name plus the Scottish equivalent of "Smith" would get so many hits?

Dye-o-rama, artichokes, ladybugs and a Happy Anniversary!

2006-06-16T23:43:00.000-07:00

Dye-o-rama's deadline was Monday to send out your pal's goodies...which meant that Sunday night, I spun up this:

My pal didn't have a blog but said she likes pansies, chocolate, striped socks and purple, turqouise, green and was an art teacher (although currently a SAHM) and google brought up an exhibit of "mirth-enware" so I thought I might do okay with doing something different and funky. Hence the purple superwash merino, pink and purple superwash merino, purple silk loopy encasement of the superwash, purple & green & blue mohair, ice blue merino tencel, bright green superwash, green (but a sort of tealy green) silk, pale spring green merino tencel...spun to make somewhat random stripes and color changes and textures.

It doesn't look very good in the skein, it looks better when spread out so you can maybe see the colors and textures a little better:

(click to see it bigger)

If I had planned better I would have made an exact mirror pattern, but instead, if she makes say, a scarf, it will start and end pretty much the same but not exactly. I also would have had some S twist singles to add in as well for more random texture.
But on Monday, I waited for it to be dry, popped some cutesy sheep soaps and peppermint patties I snagged on Saturday's post-camel tour-Julian-browsing-shopping-pie-eating-spree and shipped it out, 'cuz I was outta time.

I was really nervous though, and almost didn't send it and just sent something more "normal," but she said she likes it, so it's all good.

Today I received yarn and a note from my swap partner, Siri of Knitting Iris who has a beautiful blog.

The color isn't quite right in this pic--it's more true in her post here.

It seems very similar to kona superwash, which is sportweight and I weighed it and there's 100 grams there, so I think I might try to knit the sportweight version of the "Lovely Lace Socks" from the Spring 06 IK.

I really like the colors in it (Nick does too, maybe I could make him one sock ;)) Nah, it's gonna be lacey socks.

Artichokes

Trader Joe's has those fancy purple artichokes again

and I think they're terribly sexy.

(and lemme tell you, they definitely cook faster than the others)
We steamed them and Nick made a lemon-garlic aiolli to dip them in and I made some salsa to fill them with (after scooping out the thistle) and sticking 'em under the broiler. They were good.

The color that came out of them was really neat--purple stains in the steam tray, and later the water was that beautiful vivid green. Then I made the mistake of adding alum and yarn and it all went gray. Bleh. Now I know, acid only.

Ladybug Lifecycle

I'm really loving all the ladybugs around lately, in all their forms:

The larval stage (when they eat the most) which you've already seen

The pupal stage (and ickiest)

More than a pupa, not yet a ladybug (and sorry, very fuzzy, but still you can tell)

And a full-blown (and full figured) ladybug

Ah, bugspotting...simple pleasure, simple mind.

Happy Anniversary

Thanks everybody for all your birthday wishes to Nick; he was very embarrassed by the whole post.

Today is our 4th wedding anniversary--it's odd, it feels like "is that all? Where'd the time go?" and at the same time, "four years? Good g-d, ONLY four years?" I think it feels like longer because we knew we'd stick together from the moment we, er, cleaved. We worked together first, then lived together just as roommates (although that only lasted a month) and we've kept the same anniversary. I proposed a year after we kissed at the G St Pub in Davis, and we got married a year after that. It makes keeping track of things pretty easy, because we aren't so good at that.

We had a relatively mellow day, reading and relaxing, one of our favorite kinds of days.

The picture of Nick in the post below is one of my favorites of him from our wedding day. I have other pictures that make my heart burst with joy, love, happiness and an incredible unbelievable feeling of luck, but he'd be mad if I posted them.

The Bestest Bunny Has a Birthday

2006-06-09T22:56:00.000-07:00

My irresistible charming man, I love you.

I love everything about you--and especially that smile. Happy birthday, handsome.

(Next year I'll actually figure out something wrappable to get you, really. Really.)

******

In absolutely unrelated news, the end times are nigh.

Gardening is the New Knitting

2006-06-08T21:04:00.000-07:00

(...is the new yoga)

Oh, dang, I can hear your eyes rolling in your heads from here.

Alternately, this post could be titled: "this ho' be plumb wore out"

Cristina came over and helped me whack the crap outta the weedpatch that passes for our front yard.

Here in San Diego it's mostly clay and rock and my front yard is no different. So it's slow going putting anything in the ground. And frankly, since we rent, it's pretty stupid to even bother. But it looked awful, and there's been some bad vibes floatin' around of the homeowners v. the renters style (the noisy Navy kids have kind of brought this to a head) and I wanted a prettier yard anyway.

(And note to landlord, if I call you, ask you for permission to replant the yard, then send you a diagram of what's going to be going on with the request to CALL US if anything is a problem, don't e-mail a week and a half later. Too late. Sh!t's in the ground. Sorry, the yard looked like cr@p, you fired the gardener, and we'd like to live here with happy neighbors. Or at least neighbors that don't give us the stinkeye. Tearing up my front yard seems to be a major social event--it's taking me forever but everybody seems pretty thrilled and curious, so that's nice.)

I bought ladybugs because I saw what looked suspiciously like aphids on my mint, and hooray! some have decided to have babies. Really ugly babies.

Nowhere near the cute babies you see on FarmgirlFare who I found via Heidi who is too cool to post any more. ;P

Anyway, the Farmgirl has some great seed companies in her sidebar--I really need to update mine BTW. Puttin' it on the list. My favorite was Pinetree--scroll down and check out their dye plant seeds. Great prices. Only my red amaranth came up from my Seeds of Change dye seeds package, I'm not sure what I did wrong, so I reordered from Pinetree some of what I was out of and I was really excited to see indigo and woad available.

And Heidi's link to The Anti-craft made me look through it again and see the stuff I missed the first time, like Doll Parts as awesome-creepy planter funtime thingies. Speaking of, Cristina clued me into Joann's as a source of awesomely cheap planters and pots--and, oh, oh!
A metallic tubing bright pink flamingo windchime set almost four feet tall and on sale!
But I didn't buy it.
But now that I think about it again I want it. (Good g-d, WHY?)
I was really there to buy a hot glue gun for Nick, it's cute how much he loves it. Why does he need a glue gun?

The "spare room" is officially full. It's too hot for brewing beer, so Nick has picked up model remote control planes. Lots of fixing is involved. Nick had every kind of epoxy available it seemed, but the glue gun? The glue gun gives the real love.

Anyway, back to gardening. From Baker Heirloom Seed Co. I bought some fancy Italian asparagus seeds and then I read about them. D'oh! 2 to 3 years (but a low maintenance bed that goes for 15-20 years) I don't think we'll be here long enough. And coincidence--an Anti-craft article on asparagus. A weird loop my life is lately. Or at least, this post. A random. fragmented loop.

So, I now have more seeds than I have places for, and (predictably) more basil seedlings than you can shake a stick at.

Dye-o-rama, mama

2006-06-05T21:15:00.000-07:00

Like everything about me, this is seriously delayed.

I am participating in the Dye-o-Rama swap project. They (not-so) recently posted an exhaustive list of questions. I wish my buddy had a blog as there's lots of useful info here. Anyway, this may be too late as some have already received their yarns, but since I'm still dithering about what to send mine...

Specific to this swap:

Your favorite colors?

Blue and green, orange and red (I like dyeing purples an pink, but not keen on them as part of my wardrobe) Not keen on pastels or florescents, but I do like bright saturated colors, and misty, twilight tinted colors. I like skeins that have colors that play well together, plus one that pops out and hits you in the nose (like oceanic blue & green & seastone with an orange Garibaldi flash)

Preferred yarn weight (Fingering, Sport, DK, maybe even Worsted)?
No preference.

Do you prefer solid or multicolored yarn?
Multi-colored or kettle-dyed solids are more fun to knit with when you've got less than a sweater's worth, for socks and scarves and such, IMHO.

If your buddy is able to do so, would you like a variegated, self-striping, or self-patterning yarn?
The latter two sound like an interesting challenge, but I know I am going to love whatever comes--serendipity is fun enough. I've never bought any self-striping or self-patterning yarn myself.

Would you be interested in a wool blend sock yarn (nylon, tencel, silk, acrylic, alpaca, etc.)?
Not real keen on the acrylic, honestly. But like I said, this is for fun, for both, so who knows, I might be pleasantly surprised--there's some acrylic out there that I think totally rocks (well, "micro-fiber" like Berocco's Plush)

Imagine the perfect colorway. What would you name it?
Oceanic Flight 815. Just kidding.
Scripps Pier? Garibaldi Flash? Maybe I'll dye a San Diego sunset colorway with occasional tints of green and call it Green Flash, although I've never seen the Flash myself.

What was the biggest appeal to you for joining this dye-along?
I love handpainted yarns, I do them all the time for the shop (though I'm cr@p at listing stuff) and I love seeing the infinite variety that comes out of other people's pots. It seems like everything I do lately is with an eye to selling it, I thought it'd be fun to trade a little, to create something completely different without having to worry about selling/pricing and play with the creation process.

General yarn/fiber questions:

Have you dyed yarn/fiber before?
Yes.

If so, what’s your favorite dye and method?
I don't think I have a favorite, just different methods for different effects. Mostly I use acid dyes and do variegated colorways.

Do you spin?
Love, love, love it.

Have you knit socks before?
A baby sock. And I have a sock on the needles now. I don't know where it is, but it's there.

Do you use sock yarn for just socks or in other patterns too?
Sock yarn is just a very general weight class term to me. So, yes. The Gems Opal is a great weight for socks and I did the BiColor Cardigan out of it. Which reminds me, I really need to finish it.

What are some of your favorite yarns?
Handspun. Handpainted. Like farts, I prefer my own brand. Ha, no, I also love the Fleece Artist that Amy just sent me, I'm drawn to Elsbeth Lavold's Silky Wool. Henry's Attic organic cottons, the thick and thin Colinette clone of the Le Bouffon. I love stuff that smells sheepy and/or has a sheen, like silk/wool 50/50 blends or merino/tencel. I'm trying to love linen.

What yarn do you totally covet?
I must be too self-indulgent. If I want it, I buy it or make it.

Favorite patterns?
Norah Gaughan's new book looks very cool, and I have Teva Durham's Loop-d-Loop. I like those patterns that are classics with a twist and inspired by flowing natural shapes. I like cables, but I also like easy. I like comfortable and I like cute.

Any pattern you would love to make if money and time were no object?
Totally stealing Heidi's idea of doing Teva Durham's Cabled Riding Coat out of handspun vicuña.

Favorite kind of needles (brand, materials, straights or circs, etc)?
I have Denise interchangeables. For the smaller sizes I like the Chiao Goo bamboo or Brittany DPNs, Inox circs or Addi circs. I hate crappy joins.

If you were a specific kind of yarn, which brand and kind of yarn would you be?
I see a quiz out of this. I don't have a clue. Some sort of handspun, spun in the grease maybe.

Nothing to do with knitting/yarn/fiber in any way but seemed kinda fun:

Do you have a favorite candy or mail-able snack?
I love trail mix with chocolate in it; my secret pal made some that was so good, the dogs stole the package from where the mailman had dropped it over the fence and dismantled it in the yard (thankfully, she'd packaged the mix to be whippetproof) and they've NEVER done that before or since. Chocolate, sour, and/or funky candy. Whenever I make the mistake of buying Red Vines they go way too fast and I get a red film on my teeth.

What’s your favorite animal?
Dogs. (and don't tell the dogs, but I'd really like a cat. Or cats. And I have a thing for chickens. And it would be neat to have the space [well, the zoning really] for sheep and goats.)

Do you have pets? What are their species/names/ages?
Tahoe, whippet, 5 years old, neutered male. Libélula (Belu [BAY-loo] for short), fat whippet, 3 years old, spayed female. Two parakeets, Junior is nearly six years old and Pollo del Cielo (Heaven's Chicken) is of an undeterminate age as he was a handoff from a neighbor. He didn't come with a name either so we gave him that one, a spoof from a folk song. They live in a cage on the deck so they're more like noisy fish than pets.

If you were a color what color would you be?
Blue or green. But not teal.

Describe your favorite shirt (yours or someone else’s)..
Umm, ratty around the neck and probably stained in the armpits. But the cotton is soft and comfy. If it's being worn by me, it's probably on backwards (I almost always catch this before leaving the house).

What is your most inspiring image, flower, or object in nature?
My husband.

Tell me the best quote you’ve ever heard or read.
Best? No clue. I'm not really a quote person, besides movies, and even then, it's a joke thing. Uhhh, "Have fun stormin' da castle!"

Do you have a wishlist?
On Amazon.com

Anything else you’d like to share with the group today?
Safety first!

Whoa, have you seen this?

2006-06-02T11:38:00.000-07:00

It's probably all over the lists, but just in case:
Women Steal a Shitload of Yarn.

Y'know, if you've been named "Michaeleen" I'm sure you've got some anger to work out at the world, but still... And I have some questions about some circumstances in the article--it's pretty obvious that all this yarn didn't just come from one store:

The trail led to thefts at other yarn stores in Dunwoody and Roswell, wherepolice arrested the 2 women. Woodstock Police haven’t added additional charges
because they’re waiting on Ms. Light.
“She hasn’t made a decision on whether she wants to press charges against these subjects or not,” says Lt. Will Merrill with the Woodstock Police.

Ms. Light is perhaps indecisive, because the husband of one of the accused thieves invited her to his home to recover her yarn.

“We came back with 12 great big, huge garbage bags full of yarn,” says Light.

“We thought, maybe, you know, a couple of thousand, but we totaled it up and Debi and I both just went white,” says shop manager Caryn Southwick.

Shocked because the total was almost $13,000!

So they pretty much know that there's yarn there that didn't come from their store (or the shop manager needs to slap herself around, because I know that even yarn stores have shrinkage, but I would think the neighborhood of $13,000 would make an impression)--I hope they track it down and get it back to the right shops, otherwise they're pretty much taking a bribe of ill-gotten goods.

And what's this about not pressing charges? There might be some sort of mental illness involved, but that's for the courts to work out. Did a crime occur? Do you want to give people the idea that it's okay to steal from your store (or any) store?

Geez.

Edited to add: here's a thread on it on Knitter's Review, I guess it's kind of an old story and been hashed a bit. The information seems to be flexible.

O Won't you be my neighbor?/The Dye Party

2006-06-01T22:54:00.000-07:00

"Hey, neighbor, I'm trying to listen to NPR, could you not rev your engine? Please?"

What kind of a wussy request is that?

*****

The dyeing party was treated to my across-the-street neighbors' displays of manliness--tinkering with their little engines to make 'em sound bigger and look shinier.

I'm only sorry you guys missed my next-door neighbor's skimpy-bikini clad leafblower operation on Sunday. Drink in one hand, limpwristed swinging of loudly whining leafblower, booty jiggling for a couple hours, only pausing to refresh her drink.
I need a spy camera.

*****

The first part of this post, I just talk about my neighborhood. Scroll down to The Dye Party to get to the interesting bit.

*****
I put headphones on and PropertyOwner'sSon-in-Law's-Orange-Bonco is still drowning it out. This is where podcasts come in and save lives because if I wasn't able to pause, go back and replay, I would probably beat him to death with his own cracked muffler. He likes to tinker, rev it, then do a very fast circuit through our generally quiet residential neighborhood, and spread the love. I'm sure the person whose car alarm he keeps setting off in his sonic wake is loving him too. Being incredibly manly, he sustains this pattern for six hours or more.

The thing is, I don't want to call the cops--I've complained about La Mesa's idiotic and nonsensical regulations before. Our sound regs are so sensitive people apparently can't even legally operate a lawnmower (max db level for ANYTIME is 70db) and this provides 90 db as a lawnmower's level. They define an "ambient base level" and consider things above it as noise violations. Even though they have a landscaping specific amendment to their regs La Mesa doesn't let the realities of the equipment interfere, so it's a reg that essentially reiterates what is said elsewhere and amends nothing.

But hey, I hate lawnmowers too.

I do realise though that if we all had to use pushmowers and grass shears instead of lawnmowers and weedwhackers then...well, it would be the end of lawns as we know it. Not neccesarily a bad thing actually, considering we live in high desert. Still, I'm saying I don't begrudge my neighbor's their expensive landscaping follies.

And while I don't have a decibel meter, I'd love to borrow one, because I bet you this guy's rig is in the 110-130 range. Partner this with loud parties with underage drinkers (okay, this, I'm guessing. I'm sure that there are young women out there older than 21 who screech out, "I'm going ustairs to pee--who wants to f&ck me!?!?!" at 1 in the morning, but I dunno, it just seems an awfully young behavior) and I'm feeling like an old woman. On the one hand, I think my neighbors are highly amusing, but when I can't listen to Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me... without having to pause, wait for cessation of racket, rewind, replay, repeat, several times within the less than an hour long program, I get a little ticky. Hence, I feel like an old woman, bitching about those demmed whippersnappers and their loud trucks and drunken "friends"...I still don't want this to be a neighborhood were we call the cops on each other--except in the case of the guy down the street who sometimes knocks his wife around. Screw that guy.

Okay, one more thing about my neighborhood. So when people are leaving the dye party, I notice that there's a drawstring sunglasses bag laying on the sidewalk. Grace opened it carefully with sticks (see! this is how my neighborhood makes people feel, yikes! but really, we are safe and good, I swear! I haven't used my housekey for almost a year because we never lock our doors, really!) and found a stone inside. Huh. Whu? Nick clued me in--it's to smash car windows with when breaking into cars. Oh, fan-tastic that that was sitting on the sidewalk in front of our house. Where the hell did it come from?

Alrighty, enough of the ravings of the neighborhood grouch...

The Dye Party

On Saturday, Heidi, Nancy, Hilari, Cristina, Yoly (currently sans blog that I know of, who works with Nancy) and her step-daughter Grace, Jessica, and Susan all came over to take some perfectly good yarn and fiber and make it beeeeeyouteeeefull.

Cristina has a great picture set on flickr of the stuff going on, and Susan has some good pics in her post here too. Bella is aptly named, a total cutie patootie, very smart and well-behaved (and when she wasn't well behaved [at some point she had Nancy's Lady Eleanor in her adorable grip and was attacking it adorably because the Lady E is in its own way irresistible and she could probably smell the fluffy bunny in its korchoran soul] was still unbelievably adorable, a veritable black hole of adorableness [or is she a red dwarf? being a vizla and all...]).
Anyway, I forgot to take pics so it was all about the beautifully colored aftermath for me.

[note: The Noisy Orange Bronco in the background]

I'm hoping everybody had a good time, I loved the colors people came out with.

Check out Hilari's terracotta fabooolussness--it matches our windchimes from Nicaragua!:

I wasn't quite sure how to handle the logistics of everything; I set up tables on the deck and we mixed dye solutions at the sink. I showed the basics of making a strong dye concetrate base to mix other colors from, we had a mixing table, an undyed yarn table, and a painting table. The only rule was: don't get dye on anything but your own stuff. As far as I know, we did well on that. People brought lots of fun stuff to dye and crockpots, dust masks, and mixing bottles and a Vizla puppy and Nancy brought vinyl gloves for the people with manhands. ;P

When we do it again, we'll have two painting tables.

We rode Cristina a little for her methodical by the book nature (okay, maybe more than a little, she approached dyeing like Deb Menz's redheaded lovechild) and I acted as counterpoint by slopping dyes all over the place like a spaaz.

I took pics of all the dyed yarn on the towel that was under the bottles on the mixing table--I really like all the colors and the resist pattern of the table top on it...so I'm easily amused by pretty colors...

I dyed some Lincoln locks, a pound of mohair/silk (70/30) worsted weight yarn, a skein of 100% bombyx silk and some superwash yarns. I was feeling in a blue, purple, green, red mood...

I love dyeing. I don't know what to call these colorways, but there's something about them that seems so familiar. There are lighter, less saturated pieces in the skeins and areas where the colors mingle and I think they are beautiful. So I'm happy with my results. ;)

I had presoaked a fair amount of stuff and set it out on the table and Yoly's stepdaughter Grace was a guest artist for Lanas de Libélula--she painted a hank of superwash and a hank of silk.

Great work, eh? Preteen labor is where it's at! :P Water colors and fall leaves...

And later I dyed my presoak leftovers:

*****

I haven't been really feeling the blogging lately...I think this blog may be moving, changing...I'm not thinking of killing it. I can't do that until after I've actually spun aand knit the Rogue.

Where to start?

2006-05-25T01:27:00.000-07:00

The major event of our week was going to Bay to Breakers; it was our first time.

We walked the last half of it with Kirsten and she took this pic at the finish.

On one hand, I wish I'd brought my camera because there were lots of fun things going on and some great pictures to be had--like the world's longest line of public urinators. There were probably twenty guys spaced three feet apart urinating into shrubs along the side of an apartment building...and a line of guys waiting to pee.

On the other hand, I am really glad I didn't bring the camera as I probably would have been so caught up in snapping pics. Instead, I kept my head swiveling, my eyes roving, and my hands knitting:

I still feel more in spinning mode than knitting--so I only feel slightly guilty for buying some tourist fiber at Deep Color where we met up with Brooke and her pups.

A 4oz. bag of Polworth dyed in various hues, I have no clue what I'll do with it. But check out the crimp intact in some of the locks.

And, um, today, I picked up well-skirted fleece of a one year old Lincoln with the terribly catchy and saccharinely sweetly sentimental name of #621.

I blame Mary-Kay for the 5¾ pounds of lanolin-y locks, she's just a bad influence and the skin side of the fleece she bought was just too sheeny pretty. I'm washing it in small batches, and some I'm going comb and spin, some for tailspinning, maybe trying some bouclé...there's a lot to work with and it's pretty soft. Lorraine Powell does a great job skirting the fleeces.

Back to Bay to Breakers...
I used the Google pedometer and mapped all of our walking that morning--we did just over 13 miles (!) so we feel all ready for the half marathon (we just need to run that distance instead of walk it, no biggie). Ha. ha. ha.

The linked article mentions the political costumes, but there were a diverse lot out there in the 75,000 strong crowd: there was a safety cone squad that actually ran through dressed in caltrans orange (one with a traffic cone on head, and Nick observed, "That's amazing, traffic cones are surprisingly heavy.") more naked people than I have fingers and toes (although the women I could count on one hand, and the ogle-worthy on one hand after a horrific sawmill incident, but nudism isn't about firmness of the flesh, it's about sunshine on the tingly bits) yet fewer than I expected, and way more Budweiser than I ever want to see again.

Flickr has lots of pictures under the baytobreakers tag. We didn't see this one, I think we would have pissed ourselves laughing. That pic is from last year, and I suppose it's just not done to do the wear the same costume twice in a row...(warning: NSFW, as are many of the B2B pics, apparently we had nudie blinders on, relatively speaking).

We totally forgot to bring our own alcohol, and we wandered through the crowd uncostumed feeling more like observers than participants (sounds like a bad thing, but just different, still fun) and I'm wondering what we should do next year. Qualify to be seeded runners, run it and walk back through the crowd and enjoy the show, or recruit more people and have a costume theme and our own keg in a shopping cart-rolling tiki bar-beer helmet hat (for the extremely lazy)? I liked the people who ran the route going the opposite way in salmon suits while screaming, "spawn! spawn!" although some fish were distracted and got caught up in a dance party. It was fun to meet up with Kirsten at Ashbury and Fell and wander through the crowd...so we may just do that again next year. Anyway, it was great to be back up in the bay area. It's probably unbelievable to anyone who hasn't lived there, but Oakland rocks. In fact, I'm saving that for another post. So many reasons we miss Oakland. And Sacramento too.

But we came home and were so happy to be back home with the dogs--it was surreal to go hiking in Redwood without them.

And I discovered my plants were traitors. I swear my seedlings doubled their size while my mom was babysitting, and the beneficial insects have started showing up--this ladybug is my favorite:

No spots, and juicy looking like a little mini half tomato...

Not sweet at all though. Crunchy caviar.

(kidding, kidding)

My banana peppers poked out for her:

My basils went nutso leggy and my amarinth stood up and said, "Howdy!"

On the gardening front, well, maybe another post.

We had a great time--it was neat to meet Kirsten and Brooke and eat at our favorite places and hike at Redwood again and smell that gorgeous rainfed eucalyptus smell.
On Solano Ave, we drove past a movie theater with a sign up on their marquee, "as if we didn't get enough in march: WATER." But it only rained on Friday and Sunday afternoon, so I don't know what they were complaining about. ;)

Hmmmm...

2006-05-13T22:17:00.000-07:00

I guess y'all aren't into watching Everything You Ever Knew About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask with the Spanish subtitles on.

Usually I wouldn't be either, but either the sound production on that DVD was cr@p, or the sound production of my TV is cr@p, or my hearing is just cr@p or a combination of all above, but I have to watch DVDs with the subtitles on and for whatever reason Everything... only had French & Spanish subtitle options. How weird is that? We must protect hearing impaired English speakers from silly seventies movies! Parsing comedy from half heard and half understood is a little surreal.

So nobody guessed where "I was the first that said that the clitoral orgasm was not just for women!" was from--so I'm upping the ante. For 400 yards of sock yarn & a VHS copy of The Devil in Miss Jones (VHS! Trés kitsch!), guess what recently published (well, 2005 publication date for the hardcover) book contains this: "My final victim was sauteéd with carrots, onions, shallots, and garlic, doused with cognac, lit on fire, then baked in an oven with vermouth, tomato, parsley, and tarragon, and served atop rice." Yum.

So, I gave indigo another go. (I don't think it's supposed to look like this, but it resolved itself and I thought it was pretty. I had much better results this second time around and I credit Snowball's diligent, nearly daily urination into the indigo vat and yarn bucket. Very traditional, with excellent results. The second dipping yielded dramatic changes and if I wasn't a terrible blogger I'd have taken pictures. Better documentation soon.)

I don't have much else to mention, since everything else is in unphotogenic progress. Apparently, I need to go to a baseball game to really get some serious knitting done. No more town council meetings for me. (I went to the town council meeting to beef up the numbers so Coronado City Council wouldn't forget that a lot of people are watching what goes on with the animal shelter there.)

Joann's has started selling the bird toys the dogs love:

They have quite a wide range now with lots of calls, even a raven. But Tahoe got a turkey. I say "Tahoe got a turkey" because I bought it with him in mind, but once any toy passes the threshold it belongs to the Weaselgirl.

D'oh! or Tips for Idiots

2006-05-06T21:58:00.000-07:00

First "d'oh!" moment is going to a Coronado city council meeting without knitting. WTH was I thinking?

I didn't have anything I wouldn't have to look at a pattern for and I thought looking at a pattern would be rude, but it seemed as if at any given time there were whispered conversations going on while someone was talking, including the charming statement, "Well I wanted to get up and talk but I don't want to have to listen to any of this!" Which is kind of funny because at the beginning they give people time to come up and talk about anything they want, whether it's on the agenda later or not. So they could have talked without having to listen if they'd bothered to get their @sses there on time.

So, don't ever go to any political process without the handwork.

Then Amy sent me a fabulous perk-me-up package complete with whoopee cushion (because she's never met me in person she doesn't realise that a cushion of whoopee ain't got nuthin' on my noisy nalgas), a beautiful blue sheepy mug and a fantastically fat hank of Fleece Artist blue & green fingering weight bluefaced leicester two-ply.

I was so excited to be trying to bust outta my knitting funk that I cast on for a top down raglan--I did swatch though first to see what the st st gauge and drape was on US6s--and then an inch of 3x3 ribbing for the crew neck.

And you know, if you're going to use an easy-peasy fill in the blank customised raglan formula thingamajigger then maybe one should read the thing first. Oops.

I could have just started the stockinette and placed markers and jumped into the raglan part, but the worksheet has a dropped front collar and I wanted to try it as plotted.

I also didn't follow the measuring guidelines--I'm hoping that doesn't bite me in the butt later.

And also, if you mess up and add an accidental double increase where you shouldn't, don't try and balance with another one on the other side if they're both going to be on the front of an otherwise uninterrupted stockinette stretch. It's going to bug you, and if you don't want to rip back a couple rows to fix it, it's going to bug you extra hard a thousand or (four thousand or more) stitches later and you'll be even less likely or willing to rip back to fix it.

So I don't know what you'd do, but I'm calling the matching messups my persian carpet tribute to Allah.

At least I swatched.

Also, if you've been doing a fair bit of dyeing and you're finishing up and decide to do one last little experimental colorway batch and you leave it in the oven to cool off before washing it out...don't forget about it for three weeks.

I wondered what that damp moldy smell was. ;)

It's a bummer because the colorway turned out pretty cool on the sock yarn, and it would have been neat to see in the fiber. And of course, I hate wasting fiber and this has to go to the garbage. I mean there's Vegetable Matter and then there's vegetable matter. I'm happy enough to wash fecal matter from fleece, but I draw the line at mold.

Oh well.

Weird looking weasel dog reclining in Daddy's arms and bathed in midmorning light. it looks like she lost her ears in the laundry.

What do they call non-buyer's remorse?*

2006-04-30T21:55:00.000-07:00

So maybe three weeks ago this Wednesday, Lorraine Powell (760/789-1758) invited Margaret Tyler's spinning class out to her place in Ramona fer some spinning and sheep oglin' and shoppin'.

And some modern art--everybody knows Barn Cats create the best modern art. (I thought at first it was a tree branch, then realised, "hey it's furry" and "there's no tree it could have come from." It must have been a huge rat and quite a scuffle to see.)

Sorry, I just thought it was interesting, so like any good Amerkin I took a pitcher.

There were some good looking (whole) animals hanging around, and I fell in love with this handsome dude.

I think it was the alfalfa chum around his nostrils that really got me hot.

But Mary-Kay had a better eye for the cuties. Check her out for gorgeous Lincoln on the hoof. I love that little lamb's locks.

Here's what her locks might look like when she's sheared and older:

Such strength and curl and sheen:

But here's the shot that really makes me wish I'd snagged some, the light catches the skin side just right:

I passed on it because I still have Eloise to tend to. And some other combing to do, but geez, pretty stuff.

Here's Mary-kay posing by her kill:

The skirting table is a construction of 2x4"s and some extra-special chicken wire (thicker and rustproof) where they shake the second cuts out of the fleeces and skirt the poopy bits out.

Lorraine brought up an interesting point: shearers shear, and the product (the FS, or the Finished Sheep) that they leave is an advertisement of sorts, so sometimes the shearing that they do is not so great for handspinners, leaving lots of second cuts.

This is of course, A Major Bummer™ as it reduces the staple length of the fiber and in the end, the consistency of the spinning. But only if you're super-anal about it. ;)

Also, Mary-Kay proudly displayed while Byron married her:

And then she laughed merrily as she watched me lock my keys in the car...but she drove me home to get my spare key.

I promised knitting and spinning, but all there is in this post is love for the Lincoln. She also has Columbians, but really, I could care less about Columbian fleece. Although I should care more, since they're a Lincoln-Rambouillet cross and could quite possibly be the Next Trendy Sheep Fiber (Finn was quite briefly this) but they feel like Corriedale to me...and Corriedale's cheaper. Spinning and knitting next post. really.

*(this entry subtitled: "Fuí el primero que dijo que el orgasmo clitoral no solo debe ser para mujeres", name the movie that subtitle came from and win 400 yards of sock yarn! Of course, if you prefer to buy it, Juno's destashing a nice lot)

Belu's Back

2006-04-24T23:55:00.000-07:00

Belu is back at home. Her labs are good, her stools are good (but left on the deck, not down in the yard like they should be, lazy little b*tch, but we're so happy to have her home that we'll smack her aroun' later) and she's seems to be doing well. She gets a recheck on Thursday. She left kibble on her plate though when I fed her, which is a bit worrying, but I think we've all had a bit of an appetite killer of a week.

We are so happy to have her home. Tahoe's happy too, although she hasn't opened up a can of whup@ss on him yet as is her habit. Another aberration, but I'm sure she'll make him scream in pain and fear soon and we can all breathe a sigh of relief of normality.

I feel a big void and I know that no one can replace Snowball or come close, but I can't help but think of a couple of greyhounds at the center...Nick thinks we should wait...but there's a shy girl named Dorset, or a mellow doofus named Romney. Not to mention, there are some broken leg dogs. But he is almost always right, so we'll wait. But I have poor impulse control, so we'll see.

Spinning, knitting, dyeing in the next post.

And hey, you who we met at the Emergency Vets--I'm sorry we didn't do a round of introductions, all I can remember is the cute girl who Belu didn't try to bite the nose of was named Selba (sp?). Please say howdy so I can bookmark your blog!

Thank you everyone for your comments, we really appreciate it. I wish everybody could have experienced the sheer joy of the Snowball spaaztastic thrill of being.

We are very lucky, and while it really hurts right now, we're glad we had him while we did, and it's nice to hear from "all y'all" out there...total flashback--"Thank you for your support!" (Damn you Bartles and Jaymes and your stanky wine coolers too!)

The Elephant

2006-04-21T17:48:00.000-07:00

We thought we would have a lot more time to tiptoe around the elephant in the room, but this "elephant" turned out to be more of a bull in a china shop, if you'll pardon the clichés.

September 1st, I wrote this:

Remember, way back when I was employed and I mentioned I was in love with someone I worked with? Well, because Nick is an understanding and patient man, he's allowed me to bring this object of my affection into our home:

I love everything about this dog but his silly name: Snowball. retch.
He's a total goofball, who doesn't look much like a greyhound at all but has the tattoos anyway.

La Mesa hasn't changed its doglaws, and we are still renters, so he's "just" a foster, but he'll probably be with us for a long time, because he's not your "typical greyhound" that your "typical adopter" will be seeking (like Jasper) and I love love love him, so his leash may have to be pried from my snot&tear-stained-tissue-filled hand when the time comes.

Early Thursday morning we pet Snowball and told him how much we loved him and what a good brave dog he was while the vet pushed a sedative into his veins and then, a lethal dose of barbituates. He would have been nine years old next month, according to his ear tattoos.

The tumor on Tuesday, the 18th, a week after first appearing.

Last week, on the 11th, Tuesday afternoon, Snowball apparently pulled a muscle in his rear left leg playing in the yard. Usually I can rub out muscle pain, but this just seemed to get worse, and Wednesday he didn't want to put any pressure on it at all.

We called and got the nearest vet appointment for Friday afternoon. That evening I noticed a lump near his stifle (knee) about the size of a quarter and maybe raised a centimeter.

Thursday morning we called to see if they had a cancellation and we could get in sooner. They did, but by the time we saw the vet it was about the size of a half dollar and protruding a little more. She said, "This doesn't just happen over night," but it did. Radiographs were taken. Shadows looking like vapor at the swollen area meant that there were holes in the bone, most likely osteosarcoma. I asked about his treatment options and Dr. Lewis said that the cancer has almost always already metastasized by the time a tumor is discovered and most dogs don't live even a year after amputation, as little as two to three weeks..."Well, what's the next step, then?" I may have asked if there was a chance it could be anything else. It could be fungus, which would be treatable, relatively not a big deal. Blood was drawn and Nick and I crossed our fingers for fungus.

On the 18th, Tuesday morning, fungus was ruled out. Tuesday afternoon I spoke with the head of GAC: bottom line was that they wouldn't support amputation and chemo as options, not because of the money but because of the history they'd seen with other dogs in his situation. And because of Snowball's simply terrible balance with four legs, I didn't like the idea of amputation either but we at least wanted to speak with a vet face-to-face about all his treatment options objectively.

Wednesday morning I signed papers to adopt him so we could take more control over his treatment and get a second opinion. We have gone to Dr. White of Valley Veterinary in Murrieta before and trust him to be completely honest and objective about all options. Even if we were just going to hear the same things from him.

Wednesday afternoon, Nick and I were stealing some sleep when we awoke to the sound of Snowball screaming in pain. He was down in the yard and had apparently fallen. I couldn't find a break, but the leg with the tumor was clenched like a muscle spasm and the tumor was now about ten centimeters in diameter. Because of its size it almost seemed to have flattened out, but it was probably two centimeters tall.

Nick carried him upstairs and placed him on a dog bed. I gave him a Rimadyl for the pain. We hung out for a while and I left to mail an order. Nick says he tried to get up when I left and cried because he couldn't and had tried to get up too quickly.

Later he was able to get up more slowly and hopped six hops into the living room before collapsing and dragging himself the rest of the way. Usually, he would sleep at least sixteen out of every twenty-four hours, just like the whippets, but he just couldn't get to sleep, he was panting in pain and couldn't get comfortable.

We moved him from room to room so he could be with us and I kept giving him peanut butter kongs to distract him. I brought him dinner in bed with more Rimadyl and his appetite was still good. We gave him Tylenol PM (the ingredients are safe for dogs but the dosing is larger) hoping he could just go to sleep and be out of the pain for a while, long enough to take him up to Dr. White.

I fell asleep next to him in bed, waiting for him to fall asleep, listening to his panting. Around three-thirty in the morning, Nick woke me up and told me Snowball hadn't been to sleep at all. He was in pain, and we knew this was probably the first step in a descension of quality of life. If you've ever met Snowball you know what a great happy friendly doofus he is. Was.

He liked to shake stuffed toys and socks so vigorously they'd fly out of his mouth and hit the ceiling fan, land behind the tv set, on top of bookshelves--we would find toys in the most improbable places. He'd fling them and then pounce on them like a puppy and shake them like a terrier with a rat. He'd make happy grunting groaning noises when you rubbed his ears, especially knuckle rubs and when you scratched under his chin he'd stretch out his neck for you to get a full scratching stroke going. He loved back and butt scratches; he'd roll over and kick his legs up in the air in joyful ecstasy and he loved to play tug and growled and barked around the stuffie in his mouth like he really meant to rip your face/hand off but I could give him smooches on the snout while we tugged.

There's a part of me that wishes we'd held on, because there's so much I miss about him and want more of but I know it would have been a series of adaptations to the pain, not the happy gamboling boy who made sure I knew when it was time to get up and feed and skipped and hopped around me and fell over (even before the cancer appeared he was graceless and clumsy, we were both in an almost constant state of tripping over each other) and walked up the back of my legs on the way to the food bin. It wasn't until nearly three in the afternoon that I realised I hadn't fed Tahoe and Belu breakfast. No Snowball to tell me to do it.

After we came back from the Emergency Vet, around five thirty in the morning, we fell into bed exhausted. I woke up around eleven and knew I should get up and shower but I didn't feel like it. I did anyway. I've never felt so empty or numb or bone-tired in my life, and then I'd be crying again with the acid grief filling up my throat and sinuses, even sourness to the tips of my ears, over something so stupid and small like all the white hairs of his all over the laundry I was loading into the washer. And it was silly because there I was sobbing in the laundry room when if he'd been alive I probably would have been yelling at him, "I'm right here, I'll be right up, STOP WHINING!" Because he couldn't see me when I was in the laundry room he always stood above on the deck and cried until I came back up. It was so irritating.

I just wanted to sit and not think. I just wanted to feel Snowball's fur in my hands again and smell his warm smell. The moments between the vet pushing the sedative and him completely relaxing and pain free and the lethal dose and needing to leave our dead dog behind were too short. If there's any "benefit" to cancer it's that you are supposed to have more time, but this thing came at us so unbelievably fast, the tumor grew impossibly quickly. We were supposed to have a lot more time.

Later that evening, Nick said the magic words, "six pack" and I said, "kitchen sponges" and we set off to procure our dual solutions to our pain.

We were gone for perhaps fifteen minutes.

When we returned he started handfeeding Tahoe and I was tossing kibble to Libélula when I saw a prescription bottle lying on the living room floor. I have to admit I pretty much panicked. I checked, and yes, it was the bottle that Snowball's Rimadyl had been in, perhaps fifteen chewable doses, that I'd stupidly left on the counter next to his thyroid medicine by the coffee maker. It was empty.

I called the Emergency Vets to see what we should do, what they would do--I wasn't even sure if I should really be panicking. They said they'd first induce vomiting and then "other courses of treatment." I fired up the ol' internet, and we poured an ounce of hydrogen peroxide down Belu's gullet to induce vomiting. She threw up bile, but no tablets and none of the dog food I'd just been tossing her. Guts of steel.
The internet offered no useful info about Rimadyl toxicity, just the standard cautions to keep the meds out of reach to avoid overdose. Yes, thanks.

I called the Animal Poison Control helpline and realised I was just wasting time, they would charge us $55 to tell us what we already knew: she had to go to the Emergency Vets.

So, for the second time that Thursday, we went. She'd had the pills in her for perhaps a half hour. They took her, induced more vomiting, gave her charcoal, drew blood for a baseline and set her up with intravenous fluids to help flush her kidneys. She has to be there three days. We get her out Sunday.

Her baseline was good, her second blood results are good. Apparently there can be a delayed reaction, so we aren't completely in the clear yet, but we're feeling relatively sunny about the whole thing. She owes us the equivalent of a ten year old light-duty pickup, but that will come out of her allowance.

We were almost 100% positive that Tahoe didn't get any Rimadyl--Belu never willingly shares any yummies with him, so even though we weren't there and didn't see, we didn't have him hospitalised as well. The stress of it would probably do him more harm; he is of a completely different nature than our Weasel. We did go to the vet though the next day (Friday) and did a blood panel, but it was a part of his necessary yearly physical anyway. We were told that if there was anything of concern they would call us, and so far, no news is good news.

So, we've gone from crammed feeling three dog household to just an empty messy shell with one depressed whippet.

Tomorrow Belu will be back though and that will help.
The hole Snowball has left is huge and while Belu has helped distract us, there's not much that can be done, we just have to wait for time to pass and the comfort of distance and human memory. I'm glad that we adopted him. We'd known that we would but we had thought it was going to be precipitated by us moving north, not this. I wish we could have had more than seven and a half months of silly Snowball time but I'm glad for what we had, and I'm thankful we'll have more Weasel-time and my mistake and her pigginess weren't fatal.

Some of my favorite pictures of Snowball, they've been posted before so they may look familiar.

with Jasper, former foster

goodbye bedshark. we miss you so much.

Gardening around the elephant in the room.

2006-04-18T20:42:00.000-07:00

I bought packets of seeds
a bag of soil
packets of soil and partitions of plastic

arugula,
persian garden cress,
thai green lettuce,
rosette green tatsoi,
osaka purple mustard greens

chadwick cherry tomato
chives

artichoke

cilantro

chamomile & calendula & st. john's wort

dark opal purple basil,
genovese sweet basil,
fino verde basil,
persian anise basil,
cinnamon basil,
greek basil,
lemon basil
and holy basil

new mexico sage, victoria sage and garden sage

sunflower of mixed colors and hopi black dye sunflowers

maroon coreopsis, parker's variety yarrow, bronze fennel, orange safflower, hopi red dye amarinth, french bocade marigold, unwin's mix dahlia

cherimoya and kumquat and avocado

Thyme and oregano, rosemary and mint already sprouted in small containers.

I'm tearing up the yard; I've built a chicken wire cage for compost. I have forty pounds of kentucky bluegrass and fescue seed.

I have a black thumb. I hope some things survive.

I wish I had a real elephant, that would be some good stuff for the yard.

Fitness & Fiber

2006-04-11T23:56:00.000-07:00

April is Autism Awareness Month!
So I guess it's high time for a recap of the Autism 5K last month.

And I ran the Carlsbad 5000 on April 9th so I wanna talk about that too.

Interspersed will be piccies of fiber for variety.

Anyone want to run the La Jolla Half Marathon's 5K on the 23rd? It's supposed to be quite pretty.

The Autism Run

I wrote this recap awhile back.
The Race for Autism was fun, and a good fitness wakeup call. Nick had been sick and I used it as an excuse to stop running as well, so we hadn't been running for at least a month before. We were shocked that we were able to even run the first mile. Then we walked for a quarter mile, ran a quarter mile, walked a quarter mile, ran, walked, ran, walked, etc. and ran across the finish at just under 35 minutes which was quicker than we expected, but still a bit laggard at this pont if we're to run 13.1 miles by September 17.

5Ks should be a good fun speed checkup, plus there's a ton of them esp. in April and May. Of course, I'm not running 5K straight through yet, and don't think I will be by the Mud Run and Carlsbad 5000 next weekend, but it'll be a fun time nonetheless. [Didn't do the mud run, and didn't run straight through the C5K]

Anyway, the Autism 5K was a fun event. There were a fair amount of participants, but we missed out on meeting up with Nancy and her family--we trotted past them at the start though, heading toward the bib pickup after the race started across the Cabrillo Bridge.

A mound of recently dyed superwash and merino/tencel. Getting ready for spring-themed spinning.

Couple of weird things though, and since this was only my second 5K I don't know if they're normal:

was all the iPods, like people running in pairs with iPods on. I hope they were at least listening to the same playlists.
people threw their watercups all over the ground, sometimes just steps after the table. I mean, c'mon, that's just not nice. It's a little waxpaper dixie cup, would it kill you to hold it 'til you run past the waste can? it wasn't an olympic competition or anything.
walkers. Seriously, if you are walking the 5k from the start, then don't start with the runners (and don't headstart either, you cheaters ;P), you just hold the pack up (some of the course parts were really narrow so three people walking abreast were a slow-moving roadblock). As I said, this is only the second race I've been in, but I'm sensing a theme here: each one's had a published delayed start for walkers that the walkers have completely ignored.
Kind of fun weaving in and out though.

A bit of bombyx silk I dyed to sell as handpainted sliver but wasn't happy with the way much of it turned out, so I'm spinning it up without really knowing what end use it will have.

There were a bunch of photographers there and I wasn't thinking or I would have smiled more. I definitely won't wear those trousers to run in again (I had something in a front pocket that skewed the trousers and made it look like I had a pinga) and need to work on my running form. Good pic of Nancy at the finish though.

At the Carlsbad 5K, I remembered to smile when I noticed them, but I'm not photogenic at the best of times.

Some of the spun bombyx plied over a core of superwash thick and thin yarn.

The Carlsbad 5000

Nick got sick again, so I ended up running it for the both of us. I waffled about going at all for just a few minutes too long and ended up missing the women's start at 10.20 and must have just missed the walker's start because by the time I got there, they had the start taped off and just a guy with a cellphone hanging out.

So I hung around for an hour, with Nick's chip on my left foot and my chip on my right foot and waited until 11.30 so I could run with the Elite Men's group.
Yeah. I felt kind of awkward; I totally stuck out.
I had way more leg hair than most of them.

I let the crowd clear out when the starting gun fired so I wouldn't be in anyone's way, then I started. It wasn't a huge group but I waited maybe a halfminute, a minute or so before starting out myself and it's strange because my chiptime and the clocktime are exactly the same on our race results. Is that right? Am I missing something?

I plied the silk with the superwash, then plied it again in the other direction creating some loops from the first ply and binding them with the second ply. I alternated plying angles and speeds to keep it random--in some places it's coiled, in others it looks like fishnet, some loops, and some sections where the silk stuck out enough to ply back on itself like little shiny two-ply flags or tags. I plied it again in the other direction and repeated the randomness, sometimes pushing the previous plies around to lock them down a certain way.

The Carlsbad 5000 runners take themselves pretty seriously. People go there to break world records so there weren't any weaving walkers blocking the course and I didn't notice any iPods in the group.

I started last, but I didn't finish last, so that makes me happy. Not to make it sound like I beat any "Elite Men" though, there were other people running in the group who had obviously missed the other start times too, but I did wait and start last.

I also did a personal record for me, at 29.58 (I think my time at the Revlon thing was 33 minutes?) which I'm okay with and looking forward to improving as I get fitter.
I ran the first two miles, walked a tenth, ran for a few minutes (five? I need to get a watch), walked another tenth or so, ran, walked a tenth, ran the last quarter mile and sprinted like hell the last tenth for the finish (I heard people laugh. I think I probably (definitely) need to work on my efficiency of movement. I heard the announcer say, "Uh, way to work on that speed, good job!" as I akimbo'd toward the finish line.)

Anyway, it was NOT a flat course, at least a third of it was what I might define as a gentle slope (but another third was gentle downhill slope and the rest flat, so I guess it was pretty flat). It blows my mind anyone was able to run it in 13.15, let alone that it was the fifth fastest time at the race on record. Crazeeeee.

So with just under 35 minutes at the Autism 5K and just under 30 minutes at the C5K, if I take five minutes off my running time with every 5K, I'll be breaking world records in no time.

(yeah, I know it doesn't work that way)

I ended up with 37.5 meters of grape-vine tendrilly yarn. I have a larger quantity of green superwash and silk, I think it will look quite cool done up like that.

Next events on the event wishlist:

April 23, La Jolla Half Marathon 5K
May 8, SD U-T's Race for Literacy 8K
May 13, San Diego Humane Society's Walk for the Animals--I started a team page, please join us/cough up money. Seriously, San Diego Humane Society has the best facility we've ever seen. I'll make the team page fancier when I have a half a chance, but for now it's just bare bones "Queen Crivens and her Minions."
May 21, Bay to Breakers!

Coincidence? Or a vast bureaucratic conspiracy?

2006-04-03T17:47:00.000-07:00

So I get called jury duty.

Nick has two cases in court the same day too.

We're both getting ready together and he says, "If it's Blah or Blahblah, get yourself excused."

One of his cases is supposed to go at 8am.
No one leaves the jury room for selection until 9.30 at the earliest, so I'm sitting there bored and ticked, because this is time he could have been sleeping, since he worked all night and will have to do it again that night (And again has court the next morning), but of course, his second case is scheduled to go at 1pm, so no rest for my bunny.
I haven't a clue why no one gets called out until an hour and a half after the reporting time; I mean, do we really need to hear a "Rah, rah, you're such lucky Americans with the right and privilege of jury service" speech from a judge and watch a video version of the speech and basic social studies "This is your brain on the Justice System" recap then sit around for an hour? There has to be a better system for processing all potential jurors.

Anyway, I finally get called to go with a group just before noon.

We wait in the hallway for a while. A bailiff comes out, "Everybody gather around [simple instructions follow regarding seating order and a preprinted jury questionaire]."

We wait in the hall for a while more. Then we're called in.

The judge does his "Hi, I'm Judge So-and-So, here's the purpose of the jury in this case" rah rah speech.

He has kind of a meandering style, you know, he's showing us he's just zis guy y'know, so we don't get to the "Does anyone here know the defendant?" type questions for a while.
No one admits to knowing the defendant, so nobody raises their hand.
Anyone know the D.A. or anyone who works for the D.A.'s office? No? Good.

He takes fifteen minutes to explain the charges that have been filed, and I zone out because he started the spiel with "This case is The People v. Blahblah" so I'm just waiting to get kicked out.

Eventually he's done and asks if anyone in the jury pool knows a member of law enforcement, and this description can include even IRS agents. I raise my hand as do about seven others. It takes a little while to get to me.
"Ms. Spaaz?"
"Yes, sir, er honor?"
Stare.
"Um, my husband's a CHP officer and he's going to be testifying at this er, thingy."
The jury pool explodes with laughter, I shrug, the judge asks me to repeat myself.
"He, um, told me the two cases he had today and this is one of them, I think he was one of the arresting officers or um..." (I am very well-spoken in front of a stern man in a black dress).

He tries to make a joke out of it, "So you'd be unable to believe anything he said was the truth?"

And I smile, but really, this bothers me and what I want to say is, "This is a man whom I fell in love with because I'd never met anyone more honest and honorable and still haven't. If he says she's a crazy drug-addled hag, she's a crazy drug-addled hag."

But I didn't want to taint the jury pool, so I just said, "Er, the opposite way really."

Which is good, because usually when I start waxing rhapsodic about Nick and all his virtues I bring his dick, its talents and dimensions into it, which would be embarrasssing for Nick as he entered the courtroom, what with the jury craning their necks to see if he had specially fitted pants, carried it in a shopping cart preceding him, or even just walked with the bowlegged saunter that physics demands and all. (He does the latter)
And that probably wouldn't have been appropriate.

The judge told me I was excused.
I said, "Thank you, sir, offic--, er, your honor."
And skedaddled back to the jury room.
About an hour later everyone who hadn't been called yet was allowed to leave.

So that's out of the way for another year or so.

I did nearly finish the back of the Sleek Cabled Raglan and finished rereading Good Omens for the bajillionth time (funniest. book. about. the. endtimes. ever.) and got a good chunk of Practical Demonkeeping read.

Thanks everybody for the comments on the sweater, I really appreciate it!

I leave you with a knit-spotting excerpt from Good Omens:

She'd stopped reading the kind of women's magazine that talks about romance and knitting and started reading the kind of women's magazine that talks about orgasms, but apart from making a mental note to have one if ever the occasion presented itself she dismissed them as only romance and knitting in a new form.

Actual Fiber Post

2006-03-28T14:00:00.000-08:00

Finished red sweater!

I was going to write up the pattern and submit it for publication (to who? I dunno. Anybody. If I'd left off the waist it would've been just right for Vogueknits, being a chunkyknit wool long sleeved mock turtleneck croptop and all ;)) but I've decided against it. I may rewrite and tweak it and see about it then, but for now, nope.

Things I'll change:

slightly smaller gauge, use yarn with better stitch definition. I'm thinking handpainted GEMS Sapphire superwash merino.
take out the blah cables on either side of the lancet braid and raise the braid up so it is just a breast band--it comes too far down and makes ze boobies look a leetle dumpy, IMO.

Other than that though, I love this sweater.
It's warm, cozy and completely my own creation.
Well, and a little help from Barbara Walker's Charted Knitting Lancet Braid.

I liked how fast it was to knit, although I don't think I want to work with the Gatsby yarn anymore. It's discontinued but I still have about three skeins left (which is amazing because it means this sweater took only seven to make I think, all hail the wonder that is chunky knitting). It has a nice sheen, but it's a tweedy single, so the little yellow and brown slubs kind of just pull off while you knit. Meh. Enough stay in that you get the point of it anyway.

It also means that I fulfilled a new year's goal: I designed and knit my own cable sweater.

Thank g-d that's over, eh?

Spinning sock yarn!

These are singles from 4 ounces of BFL that Mary-Kay handdyed and gave out at a little get-together at her house. I spun it up and watched epsiodes from the first season of Lost which she loaned me. So kind of a celebration of Mary-Kay's generosity, eh?

I totally forgot to take a pic of it pre-spinning, and post-plying, 'cuz I'm a crap blogger.

Last night I plied them together, and today I'm going to ply them together again for a cabled yarn. It looks actually like they'll be more sportweight than sockweight, but I already have a pattern picked out for them:

The Ribble Socks from Socks³ (on the right, underneath the green sleeve). Yeah, you can barely see it in the pic, but also pictured is the cuff of the Aran Sandal Socks I've started in Silky Wool and the second time started sleeve of the Wear Everywhere Pullover.

The Wear Everywhere Pullover takes forever as the linen, dpns, twisted stitches and a fancy rib stitch that is a mere 4 rows repeated but just similar enough and just different enough that you have to really keep track of where you are (at least I do, at this stage) mean that this might be a long term knitting project. A part of me is thinking this is a good chance to figure out 2 socks, 2 circs type thing, but another, equally large part says "hell no!" to starting over again.

I like the color though (Shamrock) and I'm looking forward to just tossing it in the washer afterwards and seeing if linen really does get better and better as time goes by.

Boo crappy alpaca roving!

I spun up the rest of my vm-infested overpriced "Peaches" alpaca roving and decided to make a cabled yarn of it. I'm just in a cabley mood, what can I say?

I wanted to get all of it in one skein, so I way overloaded my plying head and bobbin--just for reference, it shouldn't look like this. ;)

Also, if you pay $3/oz it shouldn't look like this when you wash it to set the twist:

Yay stripey merino!

I sought solace in the arms of the pine colored merino my secret pal had sent, and some of my handpainted variegated South African Fine Wool:

I ended up with a three ply worsted weight that'll do a subtle striping thingy when knit.

I've also been having a fun time spinning bulky yarns from merino superwash, but they're still undyed and therefore dull.

Does this look comfortable to you?

It doesn't look comfortable to me, but he sleeps like that all the time. Weirdo.

Better.

Betterer.

Most betterest.

Forgive me Blogger For I Have Sinned; It has been ten days since my last post

2006-03-26T09:04:00.000-08:00

And don't really have an excuse except that we've been suffering from a plague of cuteness lately.

Big butt, little head, a new family motto?

Seriously, the dogs have been keeping us down.

Belu helps Nick play GT4.

Belu demands I finish the red sweater.

I finish the red sweater, but Belu takes cr@p pictures.

As revenge, I washed one of the grotty little fuzzballs that the dogs had got seasoned "just right" (i.e. oh g-d! what is that?! oh g-d, get that outta my face!).

She's been determinedly (dare I say doggedly, hardy har har) re-seasoning it.

I will have a real post soon, 'cuz there's a actually a lot I'd like to get down. But now, I am running late for getting ready to meet up for knitting. Really really late. I should stop typing. Now.

I hate reality TV.

2006-03-16T21:58:00.000-08:00

But I really liked "American Inventor."

"My Mom's gonna be upset and I hope you're happy!" I kind of like that guy, with his "space beetle Utopia." For those who didn't watch, a plastic globe with flashing lights, a racetrack, feeding center and atomiser for...cockroaches.

Also, speaking of media, what do "y'all" think of this Annie Proulx Oscar™ tirade? I haven't seen Capote either, but weren't they both New Yorker worthy? Isn't that accolade enough? No? Well, why be surprised when a screenplay you haven't even written gets wing-wanged when a movie ALL ABOUT LOS ANGELES shows up on the roster and wins Best In Show. Not like you got shut out or nuthin'.

A week late or whatever, but that's how I get my news.
I listen to the NPR Quiz Shows* to let me know what's worth talking about.

*Seriously, if you think you are Clever McSchmartypantz, you will enjoy the Wait Wait.

Almost an FO. Good causes. and a giggle.

2006-03-13T21:39:00.000-08:00

This is the sweater for which I've been using the Gatsby. I wanted a simple repetitive cable stitch pattern and picked the lancet braid from Barbara Walker's third stitch book, that I received from my Mom for Christmas.

This is very fast...unless you count knitting and re-knitting the left front four, five, six times.

It's snuggly. It's also missing the collar and midriff. I'm going to knit a spiral rib and we'll see how it goes.

Good Causes

Amy Boogie's husband has a very funny friend with a very unfunny brain tumor, and there's a fundraiser going on to defray the costs of its removal.

If you are a small crafting business looking to get your name out there while benefitting the best. dogs. ever. or somebody who digs independent crafty stuff (there's vegan stuff, subversive cross-stitch, handpainted yarns and fibers by yours truly...) check out Crafters for Critters.

And I have to get my @ss in gear 'cuz Nick and I are running the Race For Autism 5k on the 25th with Nancy and her family in Balboa Park. Diagnoses of autism are going up, causes are still unclear; it's a very worthy cause, please donate if you can spare it.

And I received info from the Revlon run/walk in the mail today. It's a 5k, and held in L.A. on May 13. It's a flat course and I loved running into the Coliseum at the end (they have the same route this year). I didn't dig the disorganisation at the start last year, but it'd be a fun run. Then again, an early morning...I can't decide if I want to run it again this year. We're doing the Bay to Breakers 12k mobile party scene for the first time on the 22nd of March. Which reminds me, I need to start pricing hotels.

Oh wow. I just checked out the Fairmont for the dates, because we had a great time at The Tonga Bar when we lived in the Bay Area, and umm...yeah. For $750 a night, I expect a cleaning service in the line of Coming to America ("the royal penis is clean, sire"). Wow, must be a nice room. We'll probably stay across the bay anyway, and may drive up in the first place. I want to go running in Redwoods again. Man, I miss Oakland.

Although, I miss Sacramento too. But we love San Diego too (see photo at end to see picture which summarises why). Are we geo-polygamists?

Via IM, Nancy and I watched the first half of an "Inside Polygamy" program before I couldn't take it anymore.

When Nick and I lived in Sacramento, we had an InstantMessaging program. It used to drive me crazy because every time I was trying to waste time on the PC online it would log on and Nick's family would pop up trying to chat with him. Then I would have to relinquish the pc/or admit that no, I was trying to waste time online and he wasn't available.

So I've kind of had a "meh" attitude toward IM, until recently.
Recently, while we were all trying to organise a local knitter outting we flurried something like 26 e-mails. So I thought we should look into it. I thought I'd try to be cool and install Jabber as part of my pseudo-tech geek persona. Part of picking jabber is picking a client. I picked Trillian, because of the name, being a HGTG fan and all. But I didn't download/pay for Pro, so it's kind of moot. The free version still has a ton of plugins, namely Yahoo, without all the yahoo service crap add-ons and failures. So, I'm really diggin' it. I only sign in to Trillian when I think I might have time for chatting and it kills all the problems of an auto-logging in service (yahoo's apparent default). So, if you ever want to IM a total dork, add "tortadetortuga" at yahoo dot com to your contacts. It might be fun, but no guarantees. ;)

Also, via IM, Nancy gave me my favorite link of the week:

A Catapult!

Beauty, eh?

Of for F------Sakes*

2006-03-09T21:50:00.000-08:00

She's at it again. I don't think my mind is easily boggled, but it is bloggled. Thas' a seriously cool blog she's got goin' on. It's a nice mix of tech, great photography, excellent knitting (damn fast knitting!) and nice clean lines like MJ's. A clean well-lighted place in the blogworld, so to speak.

Also, if you like You Knit What?! and Jessica's Thursday feature and Stitchy McYarnpants' Museum of Kitschy Stitches, you'll dig Threadbared.

And have you seen the Lucia's Zig and Zag Sockulator? It's a a chevron pattern like the Jaywalkers, but you can adapt it to your own gauge easily calculated. Pretty cool. And she's got a forum going now, in case Knitter's Review feels too crowded. Though the LYS owner forum there is excellent reading.

Okay, enough talking about other people

How big is too big a knitting mistake? Something that you'll notice every time you put it on but other people...maybe not? Just a slight asymmetry?

I was knitting something, realised a mistake, ripped back to the area to correct it, corrected it...and in the process forgot to do another bit of shaping within the section. Ripped back, and the Olympics began, so I left it on the stitch holder. Started over 18 days later and...d'oh! Forgot the other half of the shaping. So, ripped back, and...d'oh, one extra stitch where it shouldn't be. In sportweight, like the bicolor cardi, not a big deal, but this is Gatsby we're talking here. Which is getting decidedly ragged from the ripping. So I'm leaving it the way it is. We can play spot the mistake later.

Also, part of the requirement for buying from gradware.com is to submit a student identification with current stickers/notation and preferrably with photo--if you don't have photo, you have to submit it separately. Anyway, I didn't have one, but I still wanted the software at a third of the retail price so...

may I present my worst photo ID picture ever?

Me and Nick Nolte got the same publicist, yo.

Anyway, maybe it's because they're based in Cali, but my gradware order got here before they've even charged the card.

Speaking of The Card, you should listen to To the Point's "Drowning in Debt" episode. It's very much a snapshot program (ergo, "to the point") but still, hear it as an alarm call. It's funny, Nick and I are almost moderately politically liberal,( I was going to say "ridiculously" politically liberal, but that is only judged by the scale of pseudo-republicanism visible in the present democratic agenda, so I thought I'd characterize ourselves more accurately over time...) but at the same time, so fiscally conservative. In theory anyway. (on my part, Nick is clean in this).

It's kind of crazy though, the US gov't takes 10-25%, your church or charity takes 10% and you really do need to save 10%. How much faith do you have in Social Security or your company pension?
It looks like a lot of disposable income isn't so disposable after all.

Anyway

I haven't worked a stitch on the bicolor cables since I last posted, I just haven't felt like it. Finishing syndrome/fear of fug, whatevvah. It's Modesitte, so the fug isn't a factor. She doesn't do fug. Wait, does she?

I think it was Nancy who asked me about the boring factor of the stockinette. The boring part is the sleeves. The body is fun, there's something to do every other row, it's not just business as usual. I just have a fear of finishing. Kudos to IK for publishing a pattern that is simple, but pretty, and intelligent.

random

What do you think of the iron cross? My kneejerk reaction based on my east county San Diego location is "skinhead." There's a clothing/sticker/wtf company that's actually local that uses the iron cross and the word "skin" in gothic script, and I'm sorry, but nothing makes me want to put on my little green liberal jackboots more than this. Yeah, they support local churches and little leagues...but d@mn it makes me mad. Am I being oversensitive? It bugs me that a clothing company with a title of "Skin Empire" using a combination of german reich symbols and "skin" is prospering...and supporting worthy causes. Maybe I'm just jealous of their grassroots redneck success? Nah, I don't think so. Why? Of all the symbols/ideas out there, why the combination of iron cross/skin if it isn't a racist agenda?

more random

Hey, no more joking about jury service. I just got freakin' served. What the hell? I'm married to a peace officer, they have to know that I won't trust a g------ word the state witnesses are sayin'. ;p
At least, not without a hell of a lot of harrassing and ball-scrunchin'. I can tell if a man is fibbing when I have his testicles en mi mano. And somehow, I don't think the justice system has such an allowance, let alone my own digestive system.

Speaking of justice systems...The Three Burials of Milquiades Estrada was a good flick. It's worth being said that the majority of the services of border patrol that matter is more in the vein of rescuing wouldbe immigrants from environmental conditions and predatory elements (this view may be anecdotal bias) just like Planned Parenthood is more about prevention of pregnancy than the infamous abortion agenda, really. 5% of PP services are abortion. Mexico's number two source of income is renumeration from the states. I think it would be great deal better if we had a lot more personalised NAFTA and a lot less dehumanisation.

Yes, in southern California speak, you say it, "whatever."

*needless to say, "f------ stands for "Friday's"

All the pictures that were missing from previous posts

2006-03-06T16:07:00.000-08:00

It's been very strange for me to not bombard this blog with photos, but I haven't put a photo processing program on the laptop and it has become very much my favorite mode of webcommunication.
I bought a heavily discounted Adobe creative package from gradware.com, so I'm looking forward to being utterly confused by the professional wonder that is photoshop.

I call this pic "The difference between caring and not caring."
The alpaca roving I bought had vm every inch, and snarly unaligned neppy bits every foot or so, and for the first bobbin I spun of it I kept tweezers on my knee and picked out every little bit and carefully drafted and spun at a fairly consistent grist...and life's too damn short to pick out THAT much vm, stopping and starting, stopping and starting.
So I didn't do that for the next one I spun.

Then I plied them together, bits of vm sticking out be danged.

Here's the pic of dried skeins, dyed with cochineal and logwood in the roaster. The cochineal is the pink, the logwood is the purple. I moved stuff around a bit, so there was a fair bit of blending.

LtoR: superwash sockyarn, mohair/silk yarn, bombyx silk yarn, 50/50 wool/silk yarn, 100% wool yarn. The superwash behaved much as it does with acid dyes, really sucking up the color.

Here's a pic of them after washing. The first wash had quite a lot of color come out, but by the second rinse, the water was clear and I couldn't see any pink, so I think that's the final color. ;)

LtoR: wool, silk, superwash wool, wool/silk, mohair/silk

I know these pics are bad, but I'll have close-ups and better pics as part of a tutorial series on the shop blog. I'm very happy with the results, and I've started stinking up the house with indigo.

Starting to look like something someone can wear...button placement is not final. Still left to do: the collar, attaching sleeves to body, button attachment, seamstress hook installation, sewing down of hems. Look for it as an FO sometime next year...

The color in the pic is not right, it's a fabulous green, not lime green.

I bought the buttons at the Alamitos Bay Yarn Co., the only thing I bought in the midst of the knitting meetup frenzy.

¡Vaca Sagrada!

2006-03-04T19:52:00.000-08:00

Have you guys seen this incredible piece of fiber art from May?

Also, check out the beauty of the rainbow on Sara's blog. Love process posts.

And...a-ha! I am the number one google result for knitting letdown. There's a message in there somewhere.

For someone.

Not me though.

I'm burning with eternal optimism.

Or something.

A Blog Post in Ten Thirteen Songs

2006-03-02T00:10:00.000-08:00

A meme snagged from Bronxie Knits, an actual Gold Medalist of the Knitting Olympics: put your ipod on shuffle, write down the ten songs which play.

1. Showroom Dummies by Señor Coconut, look,free download from Amazon. That's nice.

Since I'm a super-slow blogger, I figure I'll blog and intersperse with the meme when the songs change.

2.Luck be A Lady from Guys and Dolls sung by Peter Gallagher and ensemble.

I've been doing some natural dyeing, trying out an Earthues colors kit. I used cochineal extract and logwood extract and my roaster to do three pounds or so of yarn and I just could not get the pot to exhaust.

3. 'The Mikado': Mi-Ya Sa-Ma/A More Humane Mikado - Louise Gold/Timothy Spall. Apparently, I'm a) not as cool as I'd like to think I am and b) my ipod is in a soundtrack mood.

I had wool roving in for almost twelve hours on heat and could not get the pot to exhaust or the depth of shade to deepen. But the yarn that had first run attained some lovely shades. If I was a good blogger I'd have pics. MaÃ±ana. Como siempre, maÃ±ana, un otro dÃa...
No really, I'll take pics and post 'em. In Wipplinger's

(4. A Higher Place, Tom Petty)

Instruction manual which comes with the kit she says to air cure the skeins for a week, so, it's been a week now; I'll take pre-wash pics and post and we'll see how much color stays in. I followed instructions to the letter, even scouring beforehand, something I never do with my protein fibers. (It's a good idea though, because you never know if the person who handled your fibers before you was wearing greasy moisturiser or whatever, which can affect the way your dye takes up.)

(5. Spread, Andre 3000 of Outkast. Nick and I love this song, so funny, so Prince-influenced)

I have another three or so pounds that have been mordanted and are awaiting indigo dipping. The instruction manual dictates use of an alkali agent and specifies NOT soda ash, but caustic soda, or lye. Which is hella hard to find it seems.

(6. Leave, R.E.M.)

Anyone local have suggestions for a source for pure sodium hydroxide? Any good reason why I should use lye instead of soda ash? In Heidi's excellent indigo post, she uses soda ash (and I consider her our local expert on natural dyeing) and she got great results so...

(7. Flowers on the Wall, The Statler Bros.)

I'll be overdyeing parts of the indigo dyed skeins and fibers with osage for a blue-green effect because I'm a One Trick Pony. Love the song, love the album. (Holy cow, it's a movie? Another soundtrack!)

(8. Making Love Out of Nothing at All, Air Supply) G-d, how embarrassing that that should show up. What next, "Holding Out for A Hero?")

Anyone have good ideas for peed-on couch disposal which don't actually include fire (it's covered in synthetic materials=toxic smoke, no matter how fun it might be to see it burn)?

I'm working on making this computer my perfect computer, I need to get a good image editing software on it. I might just transfer Microsoft Picture It from our other computer, but it's sometimes slow and clunky. recommendationsions? Is Elements worth $99?

I'm still chugging along on the Olympic Bicolor cable cardi, up to shaping the shoulders. Perhaps I'll edit this post later and put in piccies.

(9. Burn, Nine Inch Nails. Well, that's excellent juxtaposition with Air Supply, simply sublime.)

I have so much spinning and dyeing I need (and want) to do. And homework. Oi.

Tuesday, our business class gathered in the library and watched the librarian give a lecture on using the internet for research. The internet? Oh my, what is this thing of which you speak?
What a waste of time.
While our professor graded assignments (without reading them I think, from what I could see, and he gave my interview 10 pts when it was worth 20 because he had it confused with the extra credit busy work he also offers, I had to explain my concern regarding the mistake several times before he realised the error

(10. Riding the Winds of the West, Riders in the Sky)

and corrected it. "You don't understand why it was worth ten points?" "No, I'd like to know why I received ten points for an assignment worth twenty points." Vary this three times and equal it to a "Oh, I didn't realise, I think I thought it was a summary or something, I'm grading all these papers..." and whatever.
Dude, bring your game sometime, it might be nice to see a reason I should come to class.
And yes, I will probably drop a note to the Dean.

Anyway, I used the time to write up a mondo to-do list.

(11. Train In Vain, Annie Lennox. Yeah, we're past the meme ten, but I'm still blabbing, so might as well)

It adds up to a lot of doctors appts, vet appts, homework, studying, computer fiddling, and thank you notes. Wheeee!

(12. Loved You Enough, Yonder Mountain String Band. Fun band to go see, probably not as good as the Whoreshoes, but I like 'em anyway.)

If I was as cool/brave as Jessica, I'd do a monthly goal list, but I'm scared.

(13. Down On Me, Janis Joplin)

Call me the Bode Miller

2006-02-25T20:35:00.000-08:00

of the Knitting Olympics. I participated, looked adorable *cough* but there's no way in hell I'm gonna medal.

Edited: Call me a Bode Miller. Vera (who not only medaled in the knitting but in the crocheting Olympics!) pointed out Maryse's very appropriate button:

I know the media's pissed at him, but I kind of like him. Don't know him, but still, he's cute enough to have been on the Canadian curling team. Of course, you wouldn't catch Gushue cutting a gate.

Observations

2006-02-23T00:22:00.000-08:00

I'm digging Michelle's sock-in-progress/step by step pattern with pics blogging.
I'm annoyed that the men's curling final won't be broadcast until a full day after it actually happens.
Yes, time differences, whatever.
I'm grossed out by how strongly this couch reeks of pee. I think Nick's right, I think we'll have to burn it. Probably TMI. No one else should know what our couch smells like. Please know there is a "No Snowball in the Store Room Rule" (unless Mary-Kay or May Lim is present) and really, he probably only did it to show Jasper who owned the couch. It smells like he can keep it it. Outside.
Around the World in 80 Days is a wonderful piece of crap. Anything with our governor involved with it is. Hooray California!
Nancy is overdue for a Saturday/Sunday, Monday, Tuesday/Wednesday blogging spate and I'm jonesing.
Deb has an excellent and very appropriate Olympic button. Yeah, it's the process, baby, yeah. I haven't felt like knitting much today so I haven't. Some knitlete I am.
Minou rocks out hella cutely in a music video. Only click if you have Quicktime, high speed internet, and the joy of two small dogs on a sunny day in your heart.
Mamacate's "random" reccie of Pandora radio sounds like a fun experiment in aural enjoyment.
Over seventy pounds of fiber and yarn appeared in our garage; bless the UPS, Ashland Bay, and Visa færies' little hearts.

Frankly, I'm a little afraid to unbind the superwash merino wool bump, it's bound so tight.
Tahoe is the best dog. Ever. Happy birthday and a day, baby bunny.

I am blogging from my couch

2006-02-21T22:22:00.000-08:00

Yes, I bought a laptop, and I bought a wireless router, and now...I can blog from our couch, which smells as if someone has lifted their leg on it. Hooray for spending!
Boo for marking.

No, really, I bought it for several good rationalisations:

school, portability
business, portability
I want to be one of those geeks at the coffeeshop

Knitting Olympics Update

I cast on Sunday morning for the body and am now on row 43 of the chart. That only means something to one of you out there.

I got a fair bit of knitting done in my Entrepreneur Business class.

While the professor read to us from a 13 year old handout and later, and we watched a program so old Robert Mitchum looked sexy presenting it, I knit.

This class is an embarrassment to the education system.

I'll take the easy A though, thanks. (Good lord I'd better get an A now having said that, eh? [We watched curling today (YAY!) Go Canada!]).

Uncles & Bugs

My uncle's pretty involved with the Desert Botanical Garden (my aunt and he went on a trip to Oaxaca with them for Día de Los Muertos and saw some natural dyeing methods used with the rug weaving in Teotitlán del Valle Nick and I were green over missing) and he brought me a magazine that had HOW TO MAKE AND USE NATURAL DYES emblazoned on the cover.

Unfortunately, the "how" was "research local natural sources used for dyeing. Make note of the dye source's toxicity to ensure the plant is not poisonous."

Seriously. Not too informative, nativeplants Winter 2005. But they did have a picture of the leaf of a cactus, and the cochineal insect. And _pow_ a lightbulb went off.

Heidi, remember this?

When we visited The Lavender Fields and walked around the property, we noticed that the cacti were infested with these nasty looking white pustules. We wondered what the heck they were.

Well, now we know! It's funny because if I'd ever googled cochineal in an images search I would have seen examples of it, but I thought I knew what cochineal looked like, right? 'Nuff said. But, I also wondered why I've never seen these guys on any of the bajillion prickly pear cactus plants aound San Diego, and now it turns out that I have. I wonder if The Lavender Fields would let me collect some?

Pi is exactly 3!

2006-02-17T19:24:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry it had to come to that.

Cadged from Jessica's blog:
(just to clarify, all of the stuff in bold is from Jessica's blog, my comments are only included because if you read them and are playing the Knitting Olympics Drinking Game at home with Jagermeister shots then by the the time you've read to the end of this post, you will be a sticky, licorice-y smelling thoroughly ill mess who will never drink Jager again, college/high school nostalgiabe damned. That goes for Goldshlager as well. Shudder.)

The Knitting Olympics Drinking Game

created with help from Rebekkah and Natalie

Take a drink whenever someone:

1. adjusts their definition of "finishing" in order to get a gold medal.

As soon as I cast off on the sleeves I'm callin' it done. Here's a newsflash: Over 40 inches of sportweight stockinette is BOOoooooooooOOOOOOring.

2. whines about someone else being farther along on an identical project.

Cindy's not only looks better, but I think she'll probably get farther before this horrible ordeal is over.

3. drops out after realizing there is no way to knit a fingering weight fair isle adult sweater in 16 days without losing their job.

Okay, not fair isle, but this Opal, look at this:

The teal Opal, laid across a dyeing skein of the Pearl (which is supposed to be fingering weight. Really, it's on the upper end of that weight class):

After dyeing, the Pearl puffs up pretty much to the weight of the Opal--that blue green skein is an unusual example of the Pearl pufftasticness, a bit of an extreme example. The flame colorway is normal and really looks the same thickness as the Opal. I think the Pearl I get for dyeing maybe isn't plied as tightly as the dyed Opal. For one thing I don't get the twisting on itself with the Pearl I've dyed that I am getting with the Opal.

4. joins a team for something other than a country/joins a team because they like a vegetable. (Team Wales, I'm looking at you)

I have been looking for a Jamaican Bobsled team button...

5. takes a knitting short cut they really shouldn't have taken. (swatch, pfft! I'm only knitting a fair isle cabled lace shrug. Who needs a swatch!)

I did swatch. The numbers almost matched up. Good enough for me.

6. has to frog because they lost count when Michelle Kwan fell on her ass. (We all know it's going to happen.)

A-ha! Gotcha there, didn't count on her groin, didja!?!

7. buys a TiVo/DVR, so they can watch the Olympics later. It's cutting into their knitting time right now.

No, not yet...but if I miss curling one more freakin' time! Who wants to watch figure skating when there are 42 pound stones being slid across the ice, with people sweeping in front of it?
42!
Sweeping!

8. posts pictures of a dirty house or starving children, blaming either on the Knitting Olympics.

Ahem. My starving skinny pathetic dog, cringing by the Big Rock Laundry Mountain.

Look at him all hollow-eyed with hunger.

9. calls in sick to work in order to finish on time.

Um, I don't have a "real" job, so we'll go back to the messy house as proof of my perfidious slackin'.

10. encourages another knitter to "work through the pain," when that knitter's hands have gone numb.

Hey, go give ...and knitting some misguided encouragement to keep playing through the pain.

11. posts to a general knitlist/livejournal knitting community to ask how everyone else is doing on their projects. (blogs/communities/knitlists set up specifically for the KO exempted)

Oh crud. I guess I should join some just to make a nuisance of myself. Look out Livejournal!

12. doesn't fix a huge mistake on their project because it will keep them from finishing in time.

I am the huge mistake.

13. whines about said huge mistake after the Olympics are over.

I am hoping I'll still exist to whine about after this.

14. frogs entire project after the Knitting Olympics, due to aforementioned huge mistake. (finish the bottle for this one)

Oh hell no.

Disclaimer: The Knitting Olympics Drinking Game is for entertainment purposes only. Do not operate heavy machinery after playing. The amount of "a drink" is fluid - anything from a shot, to a glass of wine, to a sip of beer - please play responsibly.

Drink up, leddies!

It was a Pretty Good Day

2006-02-15T10:00:00.000-08:00

Nick had the 13th and the 14th off, so I got to wake up next to the handsomest man in the world.

Jasper was picked up by his Mommy early on the thirteenth, so we only had three dogs to trip over while making coffee.

Sigh. I'd grown accustomed to his face.

We lounged around, bathed, went to the gym and ran and swam (ugh, the chlorinated stench that is that pool!), got lunch at Jamba Juice, came home, bathed, exercised, and I wandered off to do an assignment for my Entrepeneur Business class.

One of those assignments that make you feel kind of awkward and cheesy, "Excuse me, I'm in a business class and have an assignment to interview a local business owner...could you, possibly?" But Jane of Two Sisters and Ewe immediately said, sure, and we went back to their little office and it was great, she was very open even though I was asking questions about budget and business plan, stuff which to a sole proprieter type business is very personal (at least in the eyes of the taxman).

So, what I'm saying is, she's cool, yo.

Came home typed it up and e-mailed it off. Then...the UPS man came, hooray! Cookies from Nick's mom and drumroll...the first half of my order from earthues!

There's

3# natural indigo ground into fine powder,
2# fine sifted moroccan henna powder in 2 oz. packets,
scour (I have a ton of soap, but Kathy of earthues convinced me to try theirs, specially formulated for the industry and all that),
thiourea dioxide (for reducing the oxygen in the indigo vat),
2# iron--you can use iron different ways, in the mordant or in the dyebath, and you can paint it on afterwards. The latter two methods make it sort of a color saddener, the first method can deepen the value of the color ("e.g. osage turns from a medium lemon yellow to an olive green"). It also makes naturally dyed colors more lightfast.
Alum acetate--a mordant for veg fibers,
and (vegetarians look away) hide glue for the dye vat for use with protein fibers as the alkalinity can damage them (okay vegetarians you can look back now),
and 10 of their very cool mehndi body paint kits,
and three of the COLORS kits.

Thankfully, one of the colors kits got kind of smushed during shipping so I felt barely guilty about popping it right open. The kits come with everything you need to make a rainbow on 60 pounds of fiber, and an instruction booklet and gloves. The volume of the kit isn't much more than that of a box of men's running shoes, but because their natural dye concentrates are so er, concentrated, it all fits into the box. I'm really stoked/chuffed/thrilled by all the possibilities, but I think I'll stop before I sound like an ad. It's probably too late.

Anyway, though this is the first half--I have a bunch of weld, cochineal and madder dyestuffs coming soon, along with a couple of indigo kits.

I'll end up having to change the Lanas de Libélula site around quite a lot maybe, because the dyestuffs will need a lot of information attached to them so people wanting to try natural dyeing can have a better sense of what proportions to buy and what to get to achieve the desired effects.

I was thinking about mordanting stuff tonight, but I think I'll wait 'til tomorrow night as Nick will be brewing tonight. He's made two batches of porter, and while he doesn't like the first batch (I do) the second batch we can both agree on as fan-friggin-tastic. So while we're running a fair amount and increasing our cardiovascular fitness, we may need sports bras for our beer bellies soon. It is a rich yummy beer, nearly chewy.

Anyway, after I rolled around excited in the package, Nick and I went to Coronado and had dinner with my Mom at the Coronado Brewery. It was kid central; the little buggers were running everywhere. The balloon man was there, and that guy, that guy, well he's frickin' cool. He really seems to enjoy making balloon animals and talking with the parents and kids, so even though we had to shout at each other to be heard above the infernal din echoing off the brick walls it was fun, because everybody was happy.

Really good onion rings and chili does that, I've noticed.

I knit maybe four or so rows on my sleeves. Yay stockinette.

Obviously though, I need to finish them today if I'm to have a hope in hell of getting this thing done, because the sleeves are a paragraph within something like five pages of pattern instuctions (half of that space is ads, but still).

Back to laundry, back to dishes, back to life...
(we're going to see Into the Woods on the 24th!)

Olympic Knitting

2006-02-12T22:52:00.000-08:00

Not much to report here. School. Dogs. Fun at Mary-Kay's. Existential angst. Laundry. Dishes. Crushing self-doubt. Running. Watching the WTFfest that was the Opening Olympics (Nick kept shouting out, "It symbolises PASSION!!!" very enthusiastically every time another odd Oompa Loompa-infused element was introduced).

The measly bit of knitting I had after the Opening Ceremonies.

At the end of yesterday's knitting spurt.

Snowball asleep in the spot I like to sit and knit.

I smashed a gigantic mosquito in our bathroom, and I don't know if the mosquito was incredibly dusty, but it left an imprint on my palm like a stamp.

Since I'm not leaving home for a week

2006-02-07T00:28:00.000-08:00

I've gone ahead and put a big update on the shop, especially in the handpainted section.

I've also installed a blog for the RSS feed fans of updates, and now I'm off to spread the news to the four people who signed up to subscribe to e-mail updates. Actually, three I think, because my hotmail acct is still on there to test the system.

These are some of my favorites:

I blame Stephanie for the presence of purple in so many colorways. I used to really dislike it, but her passion for it made me take another look at it and now, I really like mixing it in. I'm going to try an "octarine" colorway someday soon. We're big Terry Pratchett fans and octarine is the color of magic, defined in the first book as a yellow, green and purple color. Sounds like an old bruise though doesn't it? We'll see, sometimes I'm surprised at what works...and what is a hideous abomination unto Nuggin which must be overdyed. ;)

Hey, I think I'll be up in the bay area this week...

2006-02-06T09:25:00.000-08:00

...any knitting meetups I should go to, must see new things?

I'm nearly 95% certain it's a go, driving up Tuesday, (tomorrow) driving down Saturday. The 5% maybe not factor comes from the fact that what we're going up for could cancel and render our trip moot at any moment.
I'm not sure how much internet access we'll have, so if you want to get a hold of me to get together, please call the Lanas de Libélula phone number (found here down at the bottom.)

I guess I should have reversed the percentages. There's a definite maybe for next week. This is what happens when the state and the courts get together to make something happen.

And for those confused about the flabgina, here's the original pic that was cropped and lightened, so no actual hoo-haws were harmed in the overshare.

With my thumbs I was attempting to recreate the shape of the c1itoris on top of all that labia-like flab, but I forgot that maybe mine looks different from all y'alls.

After all, the current trend in mainstream p'nography seems to be to pretend they don't exist. I was flipping through a Pthouse and became convinced they'd airbrushed all the c1itorii out, because there was page after page of unnaturally smooth genita1ia, but maybe other women's c1its don't take their job as a vestigal pen!s as seriously as mine does. Or maybe it's to make some of those two-minute Romeos feel a little less guilty. Out of sight out of mind so to speak.

(and yes, I know it isn't really a vestigal pen!s but I love that phrase. Love it. Did you know marsupials have two v@ginas?)

Also, sorry about the letter-character substitutions, I hate the way it looks, but some of the searches hitting this page have kind of stopped being funny and started being creepy. I don't want them looking at my knitting, let alone my dogs.

This one's for you, Hilari!

2006-02-04T11:13:00.000-08:00

You wanted to see pics of my tubbiness, but I can't really do that.

You'd have to install the Jigglevision plug-ins on your pc and...well, I present you with my abgina. My navel is buried somewhere underneath all that.

See, I'll bet you're sorry now.

Apologies for my pasty fuzzy belly.

Hello, US Government?

2006-02-03T00:15:00.000-08:00

I'd like to apply for a trademark on Cute™:

And while I'm at it, Pissed and Concerned™:

2006-02-02T10:54:00.000-08:00

I did a wordcloud, as seen on Nancy's blog, and it was more on topic than I would have expected. And Nancy and Heidi both pop up in it, which is proof that I lurve them.

And the new Magknits is up, so that's nice too.

Blog Envy

2006-02-01T10:08:00.000-08:00

You know which blog just blows me away? See Eunny Knit!. If you are reading this, you probably already read hers, but just in case...she rocks on tutorials, I tellya.

I like the self-striping yarn one in particular, most likely because the day before I ran across it, I was looking at a book on the subject in Barnes & Noble and thinking, "Huh, way to make something fun appear needlessly complicated in the guise of making it Simple & Fun!®," burying relevant info needlessly, when Eunny's tutorial posts the salient points of the process, adds nicely lit pics and bam. Good info. Free.

I should think of something bad to say so I don't sound like an ad, but I can't.

So...look, a dog!

Anybody up for the Whistlestop this weekend?

And how about the third Saturday this month for the Santa Monica roadtrip (LUSH, wildfibers, lunch)? Since Heidi's got something this Saturday, and Hilari's mom won't let her play with us next weekend.

Racing for a real post...

2006-01-30T10:26:00.000-08:00

I don't think I've mentioned here that Nancy has goaded some of us into signing up for a half marathon. Apparently she noticed our knitting and spinning hobbies are, uh, kind of sedentary.

Now she's poking at us to do a mud run, a fun little five kilometer run through an obstacle course of muck. If it's like the hugely popular (so popular they have two days of it now) Camp Pendleton mud run, we'll need to use a half a roll of duct tape to keep our shoes on.

Actually, that does sound fun.

After the Revlon 5k, I pretty much stopped running. Stopped going to the gym, didn't do much but the occasional lazy stagger around dog beach after the dogs, so I'm really glad Nancy has provided this impetus, especially since it meshes so well with Nick and my goal to enjoy our surroundings more, take advantage of the weather and so on and suchforth since we don't actually know when we might be moving. And I guess I've found that my motivation to exercise also needs to involve

the chance to humiliate myself in public
a free, or cheap, shirt

I mean, look at all these local running events. I guess this is what happens when you have disgustingly nice weather most of the time.

I like these events:

An April Fool's Day 20k, very hilly...probably won't be in shape enough for that but it might be something to shoot for: 41st Annual EL Cajon 20k flier (pdf)

The aforementioned 5k mudrun, practically in our neighborhood, April 8th.

Easy, fast, for a good cause: Race for Autism, a 5k March 25th in Balboa Park.

May 13, Running Through the Vineyards 10k sounds fun. And the weekend before that is a good practice 8k, the U-T's Race for Literacy where you get to run down the 163.

May 21st, the 12k party which is Bay to Breakers in San Francisco, which Nick and I hope to run with Kirsten. Check out her new cute header. Aaaaaaw.

How about a practice Half Marathon, running 8k of it on the Great Wall of China? We could dress as Mongolians, it'd be fun!

September 17th, the event which started it, the Disneyland Half Marathon.

and then, so I don't immediately stop and get tubby again like last time:

In October, running across the Coronado Bridge?

Well, dang, it looks like I'd better get a job to pay for all these race fees!

Look, knitting!:

Fingerless gloves from that Baby Alpaca Grande. Soft & superfast knitting. I have enough left over for maybe a baby hat. Bulky knitting on the wrists isn't the most flattering, but I like them anyway. They look slightly better on:

I also feel better about having lost the packet of cable needles as soon as I got home from last Saturday--it turned out they had been stolen. I found them in the corner bed lair:

Fortunately, the needles were fine, the package was only ever so slightly gnawed.

And Ande sent me a very cool package with lots of stuff I love, including dried dead bugs!

And indigo!

Fun stinky times to come man, yeah.

Tuesday toodlings posted on Wednesday. Random Notes on Dyeing.

2006-01-25T09:54:00.000-08:00

Saturday we went up to the Oceanside Library to spin (well Nancy and I spun, and Cristina spun, and Jessica wowed a roomful of fifty knitters by knitting her Rogue sleeves two at a time) and we had a good time hanging out and watching the miracle of three or so people teaching fifty how to knit. And a woman who thought the perfect place to change her baby was Right In Front Of Some Grossed Out Young Craftsters.

Yeah, right, they're all just parts, and we all got 'em, and we all sh!t our pants once upon a time and may do so again in the future but really. Ew.

I'm hoping it's not a trend, but once again, I unearthed my wallet in the after events.

A little bit at Black Sheep: Brittany cable needles which I love, but I've already lost them, and the bag they came in, and the bag the shop put them in, almost the instant I came home. A new level in my levels of dumbassédness. So they are not pictured in this Obligatory Post Shopping Pic.

A little bit at Noble Knits (the owner is the one who made the knitting event at Oceanside possible, with fifty gift bags of starter kits from Plymouth. Major props for that.) I had to buy the tape measure with the car and the stoplight because...um. Never mind.

A bunch of smelly stuff at a the Magic Hands Workshop booth at the little weekend market they have in Encinitas. Yummy smelling stuff, but I could do without some of the schtick. That's what's nice about ordering from Nancy. No schtick, all... never mind.

An IK back issue I bought for the "Aran Muff" (no, not really, I just like saying it) and Teva Durham's sexy renaissance tunic, the gansey layette and some other patterns with potential at Common Threads. They have reorganised and it looks awesome (it's still by color though mostly, bummer) and their Manos is priced below retail.

And a skein of Plymouth's Baby Alpaca Grande because every time I see it, I pick it up and marvel at how soft it is. And while I know I could spin a soft bulky weight alpaca two-ply...I have one fingerless cabled mitt nearly done with almost no knitting time. Almost instant gratification. Knitting On the Beach is a nice little shop--she has a cabled cashmere yarn in three colors, which speaks of real commitment to me. ;)

And then I fell off the wagon again yesterday and bought more damn buttons (naturally dyed and carved from the dropped nuts of rare indonesian trees--which ones, I can't remember), Bush's Knitting Vintage Socks which I bought for the different toes really, and another skein of Silky Wool. I can't seem to stop. Oddballs galore. Lakeside Knits is having a sale on books, 20% off, but only until the end of the month.

Amidst the shopping madness, I have been doing somewhat constructive things. School has started, and I think I'll be crashing some classes to try and get the last stray I want on my schedule.

I wetted out some stuff for dyeing. Annoyed by my dinky little aluminum stockpot from Target which has served me faithfully for two years, I went to twenty thrift shops looking for a huge stockpot at a good price. Since when did an enamel 20 qt stockpot become worth $70 used? In frustration, I went to Costco, for other household crap we "need" and snagged my new best friend:

Last one at La Mesa, $29.99. I can fit two and a half pounds of fiber in there and it beats the hell out of a $70 stockpot or the throwaway aluminum roasting pans bought at a 99¢ store. Although those are a handy low investment easy cleanup dyeing vessel too, just remember to recycle.

Although you can see in that pic that there probably is room for one more one pound dyeing hank if I planned my dye distribution right. You need enough water to keep the hanks floating, or at least not compressed on each other, swollen with liquid. You want to set the dye, but not cook the wool, it can be a fine line if you overload it.

These are sort of just random notes for three different tutorials I'll be putting on LdL sometime next month. Kettle, crockpot, and oven roasting. 3 different styles, 3 different results, although your technique within these also changes the outcomes greatly, o' course.

Materials used for all of them though is here:

I buy my dyeing supplies from Dharma Trading Co.. They even sell syringes for injecting dye inside these mondo dye skeins--very handy, since more handling can equal muddling of colors. I also use the syringes to help be more exact with the dye solution amounts for consistency.

A candy thermometer is handy for avoiding a boiling and keeping track of where the heat is at.

Ph papers are probably my favorite time/worry saver. Testing to make sure I'm at the right acidity (4) makes sure I'm not wasting time trying to get dye to set into something that's too alkaline, or that it's not so acid that the dye hits only on the surface and doesn't even penetrate. Just a glug or so of vinegar in a bucket, fill it up with lukewarm water, test the ph, then lay the protein fiber or yarn on the surface and gently press down. I use those industrial laundry buckets (well rinsed of course) because you can wet out about four or five pounds of stuff in one. I get the buckets from Greyhound Adoption Center (animal rescue groups go through laundry like crazy, big surprise), but you can buy them or ask your own local to save them for you and trade them a bunch of ratty towels. They almost always need towels.

Look! A bucket!

And a skein of Le Bouffon waiting to be pushed down into a stockpot for wetting out as well. I think it's purely pretty.

I usually let stuff wet out for twenty four hours. It depends on the fiber. Silk takes frickin' forever and when you are dyeing you really need to spread it out and open to let the dyes penetrate and use a strong concentration. At least, in my experience.

Having the bucket in the corner means I pick stuff out, load the crockpot, kettle, & roasting pan and can do the dyeing little by little as it is convenient.

You don't want to leave stuff too long because it can get funky, but if it's cool like it has been, I think I strung the dyeing out over three or four days in little bursts of messiness.

Anyway.
In the pans, spread out the yarn or fiber and paint it as you prefer. I squeeze out most of the water and let the dye solution (a super concentrated dye solution measured out into a measured amount of water) swell up the fiber. Repeat the pattern, layer by layer. Eventually, you end up with this:

Put the lid on the roaster and turn it on to 225, 235°F or so. Experiment as they may vary, I'm not sure how much quality control you get for $29.99. You do not want bubbles, you do want a healthy amount of smelly steam when you lift the lid.

Same with the roasting pan, although since you won't be covering this, you need to check it often to make sure there is still enough water. Remember you want it well saturated, no scorching, so keep it filled almost up the first lip. I set my oven to 275°F but again, ymmv, as I think my oven may be a little cool. We're always amazed at its ability to produce scorching hot control knobs and pies still cool in the middle. Add warm water as needed to keep the level up.

With the stockpot on the stovetop, there are a lot of ways you can play it and create different effects. Filling the pot with dye solution and water, immersing the skein and then turning on the heat will produce a more even coloration.

Placing the skein in the pot and painting it in the water and then turning on the heat will produce more variegated effects and muddling colors (not neccesarily a bad thing) and placing it in the water, turning on the heat waiting for setting temp (it varies fiber by fiber, generally around 210°F for wool, lower for silk. Hot enough to really steam, cool enough to not produce bubbles. The pot will creak and be on the edge of a boil, but no bubbles) and then painting it can produce some dramatic color effects. If you want to do this, make sure you have retied the skeins very loosely so you can open it up to paint inside it very gently. On my stove, I could call the right temperature setting around a three or four on a scale of 0-10, 10 being the roiling boil full flame, and 0 being off, of course.

As for how long these should go, I let it go until all dye is exhausted, waste not want not, don'tcha know.

You can check for exhaustion by gently pressing down on the fiber. Clear, or nearly clear water? There you go, it's exhausted and should all be set in the fiber. Turn off the crockpot/oven/stockpot and let it cool completely before handling. For large quantities this can be overnight, as it may feel cool on top but still be setting (and hot) in the middle. Agitating hot fibers can produce felting. Don't forget AHA--heat, agitation, alkalinity. Any two of these factors can produce felting. The stuff in the oven will cool off first.

My first wash is usually in lukewarm water, or a water temp that matches the dyebath.

I add a generous splash of vinegar to the water and gently place the fiber/yarn into the sink.

Gently swish it around and open it up. Only do so much at a time as can float without pressing down on the bottom. Let soak for five minutes, swish around gently again, gently pull it toward you away from the tap and the drain, let the water out.

Refill the sink with the water flowing in gently at the opposite side. You are minimising agitation here. If you let the dye exhaust, you won't need much rinsing.

On the next repeat, measure in a little bit of your favorite soap, distribute it gently, let soak for ten or so minutes, drain and refill for a rinse. Squeeze, don't wring, out excess water gently. You can use the washing machine's spin cycle or a salad spinner to separate out more water, or just gently roll and squeeze in a towel, just like with a sweater. Lay out to air dry, usually flat, but with yarns and longer stapled fibers in roving form you can get away with hanging them out to dry.

Another fast and easy way to dye is by painting the skein or fiber with dye solution and then wrapping it up like a sausage or burrito (wrapping styles vary ;)) in plastic wrap (they sell extra wide plastic wrap now too) and steam setting the colors if you have a stockpot with a steam tray. Here you can let the water boil, of course. It's harder to gauge when colors have exhausted, but this by far the quickest way to dye. Remember to let it cool down sufficiently before washing, as these things can be little hot pockets. This method is neat because as the air expands inside the plastic it is like a coccoon, which deflates when you let the steamy heat whoosh out as you check it.

A proper dye tutorial would have lots of pics of finished products at the end produced by the different methods.

*cough*

Essence

2006-01-24T21:43:00.000-08:00

I have a really long post.

In essence though, it says:

I shopped, I knit, I bought, I love, I dyed, I spun, and I made a knitalong blog for the Bicolor Cables Cardigan.

I also joined the Yarn Harlot's Knit Olympics. 'Cuz I'm a joiner.

Real post to follow.

Friday Flash

2006-01-20T09:56:00.000-08:00

Nancy wants us to flash our stash, so I am. Here on flickr, 'cuz there's a limit to even my willingness to torture other people with crappily lit photos overexposed in the photoeditor. One big pic is missing of my worsted weight stuff, I took the pic but can't find it, but it's just more of the same: oddballs mostly which speak of lots of hats or samplers, with the exception of ten skeins of Noro Cash Iroha I kettle-dyed quite badly when we lived in Oakland. I have a project in mind but I can't find my size 8 Denise needle-tips. Plus, as you'll see, I have a lot of UFOs on the line already.

I'm going to order the Opal later today--it looks like it's going to be fern & teal, talk about kickin' @ss and takin' names!

fern & teal: 18
sage & fern: 9.5
fern & caribeann blue: 5
shamrock & c. blue: 3
write-in candidate sage & teal: 2
and last, with only one vote: sage & c. blue

Thanks for the help guys! With all those combinations, I could have been flipping coins for hours (Heidi has witnessed my very rational decision-making process).

Have a good weekend!

Opinions desired most greatly please!

2006-01-18T20:51:00.000-08:00

I want to make this:

and do the very rare thing (for me) of actually knitting it with the yarn (Gems Opal) it's designed for. But I can't decide what color combo to go with.

sage and fern?

shamrock and caribeann blue? (c. blue is not so aquatastic on the sample card as this pic indicates, but still, this combo is pretty bright!)

sage and c. blue?

fern and teal?

fern and c. blue?

I've also decided to go ahead and order a 100gr 5 skein bag of Euroflax Originals in shamrock (it's a more subdued color in linen) for this baby

the "Wear Everywhere Pullover," which I've been wanting to knit since I first saw it. Allhemp6 and Euroflax Originals are both 16 wpi, so there's not much risk involved there. And I can't really tell you why I find it so appealing. I may just have a thing for the model.

I know I'm not supposed to buy more yarn, but this is for store samples. Yeah, that's it, store samples. Suuuuure.

Stashtastic ball-bustin'

2006-01-17T00:37:00.000-08:00

I went through my personal yarn stash and found that I actually only have enough yarn to do two sweaters. Unless you count a pound of cherry red mohair or a pound of fingering weight wool yarn, which I prefer not to. I'm going to set up a flickr album to keep track of it, like Jess of fig and plum.

Well, three sweaters worth if you count the one I'm working on now, making it up as I go along (which means bouts of happy knitting interspersed with bouts of ripping. sometimes what looks good in your head doesn't look good from your hands).

The rest is a bunch of oddballs, sock yarn or odd bits involved in slooooooow projects (I really should prioritise those). Anyway, stash talk without pictures is boring.

Okay, the stash would have been four sweaters worth, but the Cabaret Raglan wasn't such a disaster out of Reynold's Gypsy yarn after all. It didn't eat up much yarn either, as I think I started with sixteen balls and I ended up pushing the leftovers onto Cristina and Heidi's cat and still found a hank sneaking around in the drawers.

This is what happens when I ask Nick to take a picture of the detail--

Uh, the neckline and the rest of it's up here, you handsome son-of-a-diddly.

Obviously I need to be more conscious of my yarnover technique, as there's a marked difference between yarnovers before a purl stitch and yarnovers before a knit stitch, but I'll just keep wearing it without a bra and on cold days so no one will notice the unevenness (of the yarnovers. I think the "twins" are fairly twinnish; at least more on the identical side of the spectrum than fraternal. ahem).

I was in an homage to Rebecca kind of mood anyway. Here's a generally bad pic, but a better FO pic, while I was trying to jam my feet into my boots before we went outside and trying to psyche myself up for the always awkward finished knit photo phase and imagining a giddy-nipple photoshoot of Rebecca magazine.

I'm sure our phone will be ringing off the hook with modeling job offers, as somebody's got to pose for the "before" photos in those cruddy ads.

Another project knit from stash is this:

It's knit using (well, dang. I cannot find her blog. Which is weird, because I was just there recently. I thought it was just called The Dyepot, but that doesn't seem to bring it up in google. Odd. Nope, wait, Amy has it right in the comments, here's her site. The pattern is in the blog sidebar.) up until the decreases for the crown, there I just did a standard decrease pattern for a watchcap style hat, as I don't like the sack on head look, but I do like the super easy stitch pattern.

It looks a bit odd there since I didn't have the brim folded back evenly. It's a bit small for me, but that's all right as it isn't for me, it's for a nephew. It's handspun and hand dyed yarn from Deep Color which I bought way back when we lived in Oakland. Shiny blend, but I don't know of what, bulky weight single, very fun to knit with. Part of my lazy stashbusting this year is to get rid of project leftovers by either foisting them upon unwitting knitters, unsuspecting animals and/or Goodwill, but it's not happening with these leftovers. They'll get used in something.

I better get back to the knitting--the stash must die!

Meme

2006-01-11T17:29:00.000-08:00

Instructions: Remove the blog in the top spot from the following list and bump everyone up one place. Then add your blog to the bottom slot.

citymama

making (neé stitch marker)

step into my thimble

absinthe knits

spaazlicious

Select 5 people to tag (suckers!): No really, I know these things are akin to chain letters and they take some time, but there's nothing like direct questions to learn more about folks.

Lori (maybe after you get back from HI, if you feel like it?), Kirsten, May (congratulations on the good show!), Cristina and Ande, I tag you, but please don't hate me, I only do it 'cuz I like ya, and you don't have to do it if you don't want to.

What were you doing 10 years ago?

Senior year in high school--lots of surfing. Not a lot of studying. I was too smart for that (rolling eyes).

What were you doing 1 year ago?

Working at Greyhound Adoption Center, begging our landlord to let us have a foster dog thus bending La Mesa's two dog per household limit laws, starting to entertain the idea of selling my handspun/making a business of this passion, and trying to retain the conversational level of Spanish I had (I really should have kept that up, it's almost all gone, or at least, not easily accessible in the old bean). Coincidentally, January of last year is when Jasper first came into our lives, and he spent the night last night, a trial run for him staying with us for about ten days in February while his mom goes to Hawaii.

What were you doing 1 hour ago?

I was with Nick in Target getting a 16 qt crockpot for his new hobby.

List five creative things you want to achieve this year:

Design my own cabled sweater, learn to weave, spin and knit a sweater for Nick from the merino possum blend Mom brought back for us from NZ, start writing again, learn to use local natural dyes, although I'd also like an indigo vat in the garage. Mmmmm...love that rat widdle scent.

List five snacks you enjoy:

Peanut butter toast, cottage cheese, satsumas, figs, booty.

List five things you would do if money were no object:

I would really like to have a huge patch of land with facilities for animal hospitals and shelters, onsite living facilities for staff and volunteers. If money was no object, this is what I dream of: a thousand or so acres with organic fields and groves, solar power, water power, wind power, facilities to house rescued animals (wild and domestic), and housing for all the support staff. A place where battered or misplaced people could come and learn a skill, be it handicrafts made from the fiber of rescued animals, farming, cottage industry business, solar/wind technology, eco-building, cooking, maintenance, vet tech, behavior modification through positve reinforcement rehabilitation of abused/neglected animals (and people), organic sustainable agriculture--any of the many things which would be part of the daily running of such a big operation, their children could receive both classroom and practical educations, and since money is no object we could pay to have the best vets, teachers, trainers, sustainable agriculture, technology, therapists, and security. It could be a self-sustaining organisation, growing all its food, powering itself, selling the extra goods and since money is no object, I dream of an endowment which would generate enough interest to take care of the payroll and maintenance money bit, any gaps between the dream and reality of self-sustainability. Think Best Friends really hippified out to rehab people and animals, be self-sustaining, and having a UCDavis extension school of veterinary medicine. ;P

I think I probably used up my five things on that dream, but here's the ugly flipside, just in case people start thinking I'm all warm and fuzzy.

I would also like to have my own SEAL-type teams which would locate puppy mill owners and operators and execute them with extreme prejudice. Quickly, painlessly, but still, dead and sending a message. People who have also bred "unpapered" litters or bred any animal they weren't prepared to love and care for the rest of its life should no suitable owner up to that same challenge present themselves, would also have to watch their backs. People who participate in dog fighting and racing...well, you get the picture. I would also pay for a lot of lobbyists and politicians to make dog racing illegal and penalties for animal cruelty much harsher and spread the money around to get the laws enforced. Lots of education in the schools about spaying, neutering, the responsibilities of pet ownership. Lots of money to vet schools, lots of money to shelters--every shelter should be able to have a facility like our own San Diego Humane Society or the aforementioned Best Friends and be able to focus on their mission, not "development."

Um, on a slightly smaller scale, Nick and I would get our pilot's licenses and multi-engine ratings and buy a Caravan and travel the world with the dogs.

I'd buy a warehouse type space and have an actual cafe/tapas bar in one section (maybe upstairs) and washing machines for felting, twenty different types of wheels for demonstrations, fiber galore, yarn and needles, a dye studio, a bangin' book section, and lots of comfy places to just hang out and have a good time.
And a firehouse pole, I've always wanted one of those.

Cancer research, diabetes, autism, inner city education, afterschool and job programs, programs like heifer.org, try to fix Africa, try to save the people in Pakistan from freezing to death; if money is no object, there are lots of good ways to spend it.

List five bad habits:

I leave really rambling voice mail messages. I spend way too much time on the computer. I am an untidy housekeeper, even though I love it when I keep it clean, same with going to the gym and being fit, I do things sometimes which seem perversely self-destructive.

List five things you like doing:

Snuggling with the dogs and Nick, breathing in their warm sleeping smell. Reading. Spinning. Dyeing with no real plan in mind. Running (when I am in shape).

List five favorite gadgets:

Spinning wheel, my TDI, the ipod, this infernal machine, my Swingline.

Name one thing you like about yourself:

That even though Libelula is pure evil, I can still find it in my heart to love her.

Happy Sunday (way too many pics, sorry dialup dollies, but I did do tags for the pics, not the same but a stab at it really)

2006-01-09T11:56:00.000-08:00

Nancy, Cristina, Mary-Kay, Heidi, Hilari and I met up at The Linkery for pre-Critter Crawl lunch and it was quite good.

Nancy is quite frankly a pervert, as her plate proves:

After enjoying the foodie show, we piled into Mary-Kay's mommobile and meandered out to Crest, home of A Simpler Time, an alpaca farm and fiber processing mill.

We met a little Nubian goatgirl who was such a little sweetie, I may have to amend my poultry resolution to include livestock in general.

One reason I liked her so much I think, is that she was a near dead ringer for Molly, one of the Nubians I had for 4-H.

I learned that it is pretty much impossible to take a good pic of a black cria nursing its black mother from a distance.

They were quite outgoing when the feeding scoop appeared and ate from hands without eating fingers.

I love the way their hair poofs out like fantastic bangs. I really wish I could get my hair just like the one who's got her face jammed into the feeding scoop.

They are very photogenic little buggers. And about as soft as they look.

And one (I've forgotten her name) was also quite a good kisser who took a shine to Mary-Kay.

Nancy tried to sneak up on their champion stud for a snog, but being an alpaca of the world, he was a wary one:

The guard llamas were a little less, er, cute.

Although, maybe they fall into the so ugly they're cute category? I love the goofy lines of this guy. Lovely legs, eh? And the white splash on the chest reminds me of a very foofy ruffly shirt peeking out from a suit coat.

Sorry, I just love these teeth.

One last llama pic, but pay attention to the cutie in the foreground. Her name is Peaches, and I bought 10.4 oz of her fiber at the little fiber festival in October of last year.

I thought I'd bought 14 oz. but I looked up the Oct 16th entry and see I was mistaken; dangitall, these online diaries are handy for that sort of thing.

I bought a pound of fiber from an animal named "Leloo" who has moved up to Washington, so we didn't get a chance to meet him, but I am hoping that the total of 27 oz. of alpaca will be enough to have something lovely out of it.

I'm hoping for a worsted weight in the end I think, or maybe DK. Since there will be about six ounces of Leloo left over, I can ply it together for a contrast color with the two-colored two ply maybe, or spin the two at different weights to ply?

Anyway, a top down raglan with a fairly simple stitch pattern is in their future. My mother rocked the house and gave me the fourth and third stitch treasuries from Barbara Walker which I've been wanting ever since I saw it in the Knitting Basket at Lemon Grove for Christmas, and Epstein's Knitting Over the Edge, so there's lots of fun possibilities floating about in my head as I sit at the wheel.

I just hope I don't change my mind midspinning; that's always a bummer.

I guess that's what sampling is for, but sampling is the spinning version of swatching: A Very Good Time and Effort Saving Idea but also a bit of a pain.

Anyway, from there we went to Rebecca's coffee house and the Grove, where I further ignored my year goals by buying a skein of silky wool, some dpns, and reveling in the irony, a self-help book on managing money (it was on sale. ahem.). A bit of a goalbashing day, but I'm not pregnant and I don't have any live poultry about the place, so I'll call it a wash.

It was a very good day, and thanks go out to the Davies of A Simpler Time for showing us around and letting us play with their camelids and show us their mill (a separate post in itself). They are also dealers for Schacht, and have a matchless to try on site, so that's handy too.

And thanks to Mary-Kay for haulin' us around. I always have a really good time with you guys, I'll miss every one when we move. If it ever happens. Eureka seems to be out, Sacramento seems to be in.

Until then, looking forward to the next shopping trip--wildfibers in Santa Monica and LUSH? Some Saturday next month?

Hey Locals!

2006-01-06T14:32:00.000-08:00

On Sunday we'll be meeting up at The Linkery at noon, chow & chat, work out carpool, then head over to A Simpler Time to check out the Davies's alpaca ranch and fiber processing mill, hoping to be in Crest around 1ish.

Please come along for the fun if you can, sorry about the short notice, I've been a bit of a spaaz about setting this up and nailing anything down. I blame the holidays, 'cuz they can't hit back.

Goals

2005-12-31T15:31:00.000-08:00

Stashbusting, fiber and yarn.
No more yarn or fiber buying unless I have a very specific plan for it. Of course, LdL provides a nice big loophole there, as I have to make samples for the shop, don't I? I have to really be well acquainted with my product, yes?
More Euroflax, Venne Cottoline and Gems for me please!

Learn more about natural dyeing. Try to stop having Hilari's sock reaction to it (eyes glaze and roll back in the head).

Part of this: do seasonal dyestuff hunting hikes, take advantage of this climate while we live here--actually do a dyer's garden.

Learn to weave, start with a navajo-style loom, work up to a harness loom?

Get back in shape, do the Bay to Breakers run in SF with Stella.

Get pregnant. Ha! Just kidding, darling.

Go back to school, kick ass and take names.

Make LdL look more professional, cleaner, easier to maintain and update, figure out ZenCart/osCommerce.

Manage my time better. School, exercise and a part-time job will probably help with this.

Cook more at home, being more adventurous with ingredients.

Resist the impulse to buy live poultry.

Always remember how blessed I am. It's not many people who find such an amazing partner at such a young age (I think 21 was young, don't you?) let alone build a family and find friends which make us so happy.

Even if they're a little bit goofy.

Go to dog beach more.

Spin and knit the damn Rogue already.

The Jokes About the Farmer's Dodder

2005-12-28T20:28:00.000-08:00

Today, Heidi and I went on an East County Adventure. And while usually that might entail bingo palace fun and snootfulls of methamphetamines, we aren't Those Kind of People.

We went hunting for dyestuff, specifically dodder.

There was an article in the most recent Spin-Off about obtaining yellow using no mordants on a protein fiber (samoyed dog hair) using dodder, and it rang a bell when the author mentioned that it looked like bright orange spaghetti. I used to see it all the time while riding on the school bus in elementary school, so we took a ride out to the old 'hood to see if we could find some.

We did, but not as much as we might have liked. In retrospect, I remember it being most vivid when the rains had been through, and we have had a very dry season so far.

What we could find (and reach) was mostly dried, but here's some that was in the relative shade:

It had some blossoms as well:

The light in the camera lost the kind of sinister shine the white seedy bits seemed to have.

We continued into the east, but that was pretty much the end of good dodder pickings. In a week of good rain, maybe we'll go out again.

We went to a local reservoir, and I found the most beautiful pond scum ever:

I love that green.

Can anyone tell me what this is called?

I remember these things from kidhood too, and when the spines fall off they leave a sponge-like husk. I used to think they might be alien eggpods (those were the days of V, after all), but I'm pretty sure I know better now.

Heidi also snagged some manzanita, lichen, some very robust sage, and a fig tree with the manliest fig I have ever seen. Forbidden fruit indeedy. The car smelled fantastic.

Oh, and Heidi got to meet the little idiots I love beyond all reason.

Belu had her pegged for a sucker and pulled her best "starving whippet" routine but Heidi did. not. bend.
And while Snowball didn't flip over on his back and try to kick her in the face, I think he liked her a lot anyway.

It was a very good day.

Sunshine, fresh air, drunk belching men at fishin' at the reservoir talkin 'bout their pet squirrels...

I'm knitting something, but I'm sure it will be a disaster.

It's the Cabaret Raglan. I ripped the Tivoli because it was boring and I didn't feel like finishing it, and am using the balls to knit the CR. Then I'll unseal the vacuum-packed-stash for the rest of it.

I've lengthened the sleeves to full length because 3/4 bugs me, but that's it for modifications. That and yarn. I'm using Reynolds Gypsy, an incredibly heavy cotton yarn, especially compared to the Reynold's cotton tape yarn for which it was written.

The sweater will probably be heavy beyond belief and the stitchwork I so fancy will probably stretch grotesquely, but I needed something mindless and new to me and stash-eating to knit, so we'll see how it goes. It goes fast, thus far.

I also need to post about the great final package I got from my SP6 Catherine, with three patterns printed out and 40" US2 Inox circs so I can try the magic loop method, and some US3 Crystal Palace DPNs and four balls of sock yarn; I've already cast on for MJ's Mirabella socks and mucked it up.

I'd take a pic of the package, but I'm like a highly efficient whatchamacallit, pieces have been dismantled and filed away for easy access, but they aren't photo-friendly. But thank you, I love it!

Happy Food

2005-12-27T15:42:00.000-08:00

I love brussels sprouts.

Butter, garlic, salt, pepper and happiness.

Pasta Pomodoro, a restaurant chain in the SF bay area specialising in inexpensive, fast, but good italian food is dog friendly, and it was there I discovered that Tahoe and I both love brussels sprouts. He and I split one of their huge plates, it was the first time eating them for both of us, and sometimes I still share mine with him.

I love how they look like doll cabbages.

Eat your Fiber

I've been dyeing in tiny batches here and there, and plan to have a big fat shop update in the new year. I was really happy with this sock yarn:

It made me think of Superman's underwear. But I just couldn't live with this:

There's color there in the transition, but it's just too weak, it really counts as a dye void. I have some skeins of Lorna's Laces (that blue and yellow) that has voids at the transitions (pretty necessary if you don't want green) but I hate them. I didn't get very far on the sock I started, although it might have also had something to do with it being a gigantic ugly spiral rib tube sock...

I re-wetted and filled the void with violet & purple, and it's quite different, but I quite like it. Um, but I don't have a pic. So just picture deep scarlet, wine, violet, luminescent turquoise tints.

Heads up Locals!

How about doing the critter crawl on the 8th? I haven't contacted them yet, but it's a Sunday, say midday? We could meet somewhere semi-central and work out transportation from there.

The Post I Would Have Posted

2005-12-23T15:43:00.000-08:00

But first off, "feed a fever, starve a cold" or "feed a cold, starve a fever?" I can never remember which it is. But it's a moot point as I technically have The Plague.
No, not really, just that crappy tenacious cold that's making the rounds.
Hooray for Ricola. Boo Theraflu.

Anyway, here's Snowball dreaming about May:

He's head over heels in love, nyuck, nyuck.
(If you guys have any good ideas for bridal shower activities, head over to May's and give her a holler. I only know what NOT to do.)

And here's my beet-booby:

Organic purple on the outside, bloody red inside:

It was one of those things that started out bad and got trimmed to worse, but I like it--it's "arty." And good for drinking tea.

And I forgot to mention that the weaving sampler will be handspun and either naturally colored or plant-dyed...And as far as being too low an aim, Ms. Absinthe, I'm still not even a third done spinning for the Rogue I started this dang blog for, so I've got to aim low, lest I disappoint mahself. Besides, it's the one in the book, and it'd make a nice bag, like they say. The biggest thing might be getting around to building it.

And another thing I forgot to mention is that I actually have an FO.

I bought Penny, some lovely handspun yarn from June and knit it into Amy's Lady cap, even though I look like absolute crap in hats.

The yarn is supersoft and a total bargain, June spins a beautiful yarn, and Amy writes a great pattern.

I had to do more pattern repeats because of the vast difference in row gauge, and knit it on US5s because my head is wee, but those were the only changes, except for my inevitable messups. A lot of this hat was knit in little spurts, waiting my turn to shoot pool, waiting in line, sitting at the wrong Coffee Bean...

Geez, I look so frickin' disproportional, but I like it anyway. It's soft and green, and that's what matters. If I only knit things I'd look good in, well, I shouldn't follow that line. Mistakes have been made.

I read Melissa Banks The Wonder Spot yesterday. Meh. Worst author photo ever too.

Although, I love the phrase "porn-long and log-wide," so I guess I did get something out of it after all. And anything is better than Clive Cussler. ;P

Excuses, excuses.

2005-12-21T12:39:00.000-08:00

The computer finally had its complete and utter breakdown last night as I was logging on to get my mail and do a nice arty post. Really. With pictures of my lopsided-mammary-gland-inspired-but-ultimately-beet-like-pottery and everything.

And a picture of Snowball blissed out dreaming of his new love, May. She came over last night and rocked his world; he even started to do his upside down kicky-puppy routine for her which he only does when his heart is bursting with love and happiness.

And I was going to talk about our fun Sunday, but since I didn't take pics, I would have to refer you to Nancy's excellent breakdown of the event anyway. Check out her Vietnam trip pics too, just amazing, I was jealous 'til the potty pictures. ;)

So here's a semi-random new year's resolution:
Build a navajo-style loom and weave the 10"x23" sampler piece using Tiana Bighorse and Noël Bennett's Working with the Wool.

eBay fleece curse? I pronounce thee DEFUNCT!

2005-12-14T19:49:00.000-08:00

Look what was waiting for us after King Kong and sushi:

Hooray! Much earlier than anticipated, and much cleaner than expected.

There is some dust trapped in the grease at the tips, but not much and overall very clean. And of course, no second cuts.

Crimpy goodness, yay, yay, yay, I'll be bathing it tomorrow or Friday in batches.

I need to clean the stash room so I can roll it out and really pore over it. But I am very happy with it.

I also need to whip out my combs and prep some of the other fleeces which have been waiting to be spun.
And finish spinning for the Rogue.
And update the shop with some of the more recent dye results and wet out some new arrivals for dyeing.
And locate, package, wrap and post some holiday presents.
And write holiday cards...oh dear.

I probably shouldn't be on the computer right now, I should probably be doing some of that stuff now.

Wait, one more pic. Can you spot the bedshark? He is veddy, veddyy sneaky.

2005-12-13T10:05:00.000-08:00

We've just returned from southeastern Arizona. In lieu of the post which springs to my fingers, I give you something more in the spirit of the season:

As seen in Bisbee, Arizona.
The cat rides the dog, the white mice ride the cat, and the bird hangs out on the tip basket.
Some of the money goes to Border Animal Rescue. The facial expression of the cat while the dog is walking is priceless.

A week of D'oh!

2005-12-06T09:47:00.000-08:00

Sunday, I met up with Heidi and Nancy to knit and spin at a local café and while parallel parking, I tapped the van in front of me.
I have NEVER done that before.
No damage (to either vehicle) and no irate owner, so no foul. Still, there were (of course) people sitting in the outside café seats watching.

After the fiber, muffins, and caper fun, I walked over to Plum Pottery to see if any of our glazed pots had come out. I found that I over glazed mine and it had stuck to the kiln shelf. Thankfully, she coats the shelves with a layer of something like slip, so I hadn't broken her shelf, but I did have a cauliflower like bloom of jagged melted glass that had to be sanded and dremel-ed off on Monday.

Monday, I did a really crappy job of dremeling and sanding the bloom off, scuffed the glaze in parts I hadn't meant to, and gave up because I started hallucinating that I could see the little sanded bits of glaze (glass) floating up and being breathed in.
And I was doing a truly crappy job, but I do love the bowl anyway.

I had carved dragonflies along the side of the bowl and the glaze kind of buried them.

I think the colors on this bowl are my favorite. Bright blue, dark green, then inside, a granny smith green with the emerald green rim.

Tuesday's a blank. It must have been really bad. I know we went to dog beach. And Snowball was really cranky that night, he wanted to sleep in bed but growled, barked, and snapped every time we moved so he was ejected and force to sleep on the one of the floor dogbeds. Horrors.

Wednesday, I got a parking ticket, apparently UCSD felt I violated one of their "areas":

But I got to see Hilari so it was totally worth it.

And because of the wonder of modern technology, I've appealed the ticket online. I am a cop's daughter, and a cop's wife. NO WAY am I going to have to face the consequences of my mild rule-breaking.

I hope.

I also drove up to Santa Monica with Heidi and had a good time at Wildfibers, (thanks to MJ for the heads-up e-mail) which is a really great store if you have a fair bit of cash and love to knit with the best. I managed to only spend $20 on buttons despite never knitting anything which ever needs buttons. They're just so cool.

And an oilcloth notions bag. Just to keep the little floaty crap in my bag in a bag of its own.
Because I'm "rich" and "American" and we do things like that. I didn't throw down an average Ethiopian's yearly income ($100) on a skein of handspun cashmere, but I was sorely tempted, I'll admit.

And they have the 5" Brittany needles which are impossible to find down here, and the little (I think they're Clover) circular needles which make my wrists ache just looking at them, the ones for sleeves or gloves). And a big selection of Tanglewood Fibers handspun yarn and some handspun made by Yee, a girl/lady/woman/womyn who works there. She does it on a spindle and it's great stuff in the Pluckyfluff style.

Wednesday night, I came home to a Louet order which arrived looking like this:

Thank you US Customs for the fine job you do protecting us from unmutilated cultivated silk sliver and superwash sockyarn!

Despite my drama, only one skein and one half pound bag of the silk were damaged.

Thursday I went shopping and placed the gallon of milk I bought next to a big bag of apples in the fridge. Now, our milk tastes like apple gas. Big deal.

Saturday, I almost finished the Clapotis, but I ran out of yarn.

So. %$#*&. close.

I guess I should have dropped two repeats from the third section instead of just the one. Now I know.

I consoled myself the only way I know how, by making the house reek of wet silk and wool.

The silks skeins on the right are part of 20 skeins of the WRONG YARN which arrived on Friday. Yes, and it was all my fault.
Obviously I'm not terribly fussed about it though, as they are lovely, pure cultivated silk fingering weight two ply.

This is my favorite result of the dyeing spree though, I wish I'd done more.

It's amazing how slippery and flyaway superwash is in the roving, you have to handle it even more carefully than the silk roving, and it even comes out of the bag a bit discombobulated so that doesn't help. It's an absolute pleasure to spin though, so it's worth it.

And D'oh! The Next Generation

You have to check out this pdf. First, I love the sheep in the header, and second, I love the "minimises teat and pizzle damage" benefit bit.
June of Twosheep posted about bioclipping which I hadn't heard of and I broke my eBay rules (#1, no more fleeces bought online #2, don't pay more for shipping than the item cost) and snagged one. It remains to be seen if this'll be a fifty dollar d'oh! or not. What with holiday shipping and the Customs Faeries, I don't expect it to show up much before Valentine's Day.

I have to admit, all these "d'ohs" actually make me feel pretty darn spoiled and lucky.

A Knitting Post

2005-11-29T12:30:00.000-08:00

Well, I was making my mom something for her birthday, but predictably, I didn't finish it in time. I gave her a pantload of locally produced organically grown lavender products instead.

But I showed it to her anyway and have told her it will be a Christmas present. Although, honestly, I'll give it to here when it's done, because I have a hard time waiting for Christmas to give presents.

So now I'm feeling free to post pics of it here.

The start of a Clapotis, one ball gone, a new one just attached, and three stitches dropped.

I had a hard time capturing the color in the pics and my photo editor hasn't been much help. Here's a swatch of it which represents the colors well though:

It's the Louet 50/50 silk/wool yarn, handpainted just for this purpose, just for my Mom. I love working with this stuff; shiny, soft, a little bit of bounce, it makes the Clap just fly.

Well, that and that "Magic Book Clip" thingy.

I'm terrible at estimating how long it takes me to make something. Some days I don't knit, or I'll knit but I won't spin, spin but not knit, just read, waste a lot of time on the computer...I know according to the blog that I started it on the 15th, but I couldn't tell you how much actual time it's taken. I can estimate though that it has taken Twice Shy by Dick Francis, Harry Potter IV and half of the fifth HP book to get to here:

That's the second ball gone, about nine stitches dropped, and the third and final skein awaiting balling next to it. I'm omitting a repeat in the third section so I should be on track to have just enough yarn. Fingers crossed ;).

'Tis the Season

2005-11-24T12:20:00.000-08:00

Man, everybody is running around with cranky-faces on this week. Yikes.

I myself am easily irritated and "angsty" lately for no d@mn good reason. I had a nightmare last night that Louet sent me three skeins of the "Pearl" (sock yarn) and charged me $65 in shipping fees. Lamest. Nightmare. Ever.
It's just a weird time of year I guess.

So here's a list of my reasons to knock that anxious sh!t off:

3lbs of merino/silk came today in the "lichen" colorway. I think I'll be spinning it to make a 3 ply, but I haven't decided whether I'll be plying it with itself, or with some other color. But I think it will become the Rogue.

Yes, starting that nonsense up again, we'll see how long it lasts this time.

In the pic here it is next to a pound of Ashland Bay's merino/tencel in "peacock" and a pound of "Pine Merino" my SP6 sent me (it smells like baby! Good baby smell, not gross baby smell). So I think I'm going to spin thin and try some different samplings of the colors.

Friends who set you up with great straight lines:
Heidi said:
"So what would you knit for your man if you were to knit him a sweater?"

Well, first, I wouldn't knit him a sweater.

I might really want to knit him a sweater, I might love for him to wear a handknitted-by-me sweater, but I have to be honest with myself and knit him the item that HIS heart desires, that HE would actually wear.

Yes, I'm talkin' about the "mancho":

Okay, no. Not really.

When I've finally got 'round to spinning up the merino/possum Mom bought for the specific purpose of making The Handsomest Man I've Ever Married a sweater, it will probably be one of these two:

Sorry for the cr@ppy scans, but you get the idea. They're both pretty unisex if you ask me, and not terribly fussy. The first is from Sirdar Family Denim Book 283 (the same as I knit my hoodie from) and the second is Kathy Zimmerman's "Bed & Breakfast Pullover" from IK's Winter 2003.

The infinite variety of a bit of wool, a bit of dye, and a bit of time with a spinning wheel can produce.

(Although, sometimes, even with different materials, we handspinners produce eerily similar results.)

South African Fine Wool, dyed blue and green (o' course).

L to R, a standard two ply, light worsted, then a bit of thick and thin single, and then a spiral yarn (though it doesn't look very spirally in the pic) created by holding the light colored single fairly firmly and at a straight 6 o'clock position to the orifice and very loosely and rapidly feeding the a thick multicolored single made from a separate section of the roving onto it at about a 90° angle.

Very fun. I should have locked it down with a binder to make it easier to knit with, and I should have left it longer on the bobbin for the twist to set, or washed it immediately. But I didn't, which might be why it doesn't look terribly spirally (and I liked the way it looked as-is, and didn't feel like adding a binder, so that's my excuse there).

Spacebags. I went a little crazy and put all my personal yarn stash that wasn't on the needles and personal spinning fiber that I don't have direct plans for in the next two weeks into space bags. For the sheer feeling of organisational power of it.

I found my wedding ring again; it's been lost for almost a month.
It feels good to have it back, and I was starting to get a little frantic and sick at heart about it. I only take my ring off for pottery, and usually I remember to pull it out of my pocket and put it right back on after we're done, but somehow I forgot. For a week, and then, it was Lost. But now it's Found, hooray!

And pottery. We are still loving us the pottery. Nick wasn't very happy with the way his glazes turned out this time, but he produced some very cool shapes.

His are in the middle, click here for more pics, I made this page up to share with our families without dragging the blog into it.

And Crivens, the beautiful Crivens. Sometimes weekends just feel weird because she's not here. She's just so pretty. I love her angles and lines.

And our own dogs as well, of course.

Today, I laid down in bed just to watch Nick sleep and breathe him in and Belu came in, leapt onto the bed, and dropped her stuffed cat on my head.
The crusty one that's all the dogs' favorite and stinks like all the dogs' mouths and bottoms. Yeah, "well-seasoned," we call it.

Anyway, I just love how attentive she is to us, and how she doesn't let me wallow in moments which might be needlessly sappy and smarmy. I just love the way he smells, especially when he's sleeping, and stinky pussy was just the thing to snap me from the moment. Good girl.

More proof of my dumbassédness.

2005-11-21T13:59:00.000-08:00

All my personal mail is set to go to my hotmail account, and Microsoft is testing out a new anti-spammer service which quite effectively shuts out all its users, so if you've sent anything to my hotmail acct, I'll be even worse at answering e-mails than usual as I won't know when they'll knock this off and can't get into my inbox.

In the meantime, I guess if anyone needs to contact me, you can contact me through Lanas de Libélula using this e-mail, or if you have, like I have, configured your mail program to use hotmail as a default and that isn't working for you, wendyATldlDOTcom will work just fine as long as you stick lanasdelibelula where ldl was.

Just on the offchance.

P.S. Thank you everyone for all your lovely compliments of the Butterfly, I look forward to wearing it the one day in January it gets cold here in San Diego.

And I'm not sure what was going on with my face, I'm not sure if I was going for a moody model expression or what. I don't know that I have very good control over my facial expressions at the best of times. I'd like to get "carefully blank" down, that seems to be a useful one from the books.

MMmmmmmm...bananafish.

2005-11-18T21:30:00.000-08:00

I finished the Noro Butterfly once and for all last Thursday. I kept forgetting to ask Nick to take pics, then, when we finally did, some shadows cast on the knit garment made them kind of useless. So I submit only slightly less crappy photos taken in a hallway with a timer under the close supervision of the dogs. (The current treat cache is contained in the nearby cupboard).

Even though I started sleeve cap shaping about two inches before instructed (like everybody else I've seen in blogland who knit the Noro Butterfly) I ended up with mondo-long sleeves (like everybody else I've seen in blogland who knit the Noro Butterfly) but I think it looks just as good when the sleeves are cuffed (like everybody else I've seen in blogland who knit the Noro Butterfly) so it's all good.

I crocheted along the front but didn't really like it, so I pulled it out and knit two five or six garter stitch strips about 18" long and sewed them up the front and along the collar.

I really like how it turned out.
It kind of cleaned up the line and gave me a solid spot to attach the closure to, and although I think that perhaps the jaggedness of the knit was what first appealed to me about the lines, this makes it a bit less trendy and more er, jackety. Yeah. I'm not much of a designer. I just know what I like. Sometimes I even like it after I've knit it. Sometimes.

While I like how my handspun faux Noro knit up, if I was going to spin up more fake Noro I'd do it differently. I would dye up the colors solid in different little batches, divide them evenly, and then spin them up. I think dyeing a variegated roving, I ended up with a nice result, but not one which accurately mimicked the Noro in anything but gauge.

It's comfy, and it's warm, and it's been about 85°F around here lately, so it hasn't done much but be modeled for craptastic photo shoots.

Hey, if you are an independent crafter, and you want to be on the LdL links page, drop me a line. I know there are a ton more of youse crafty types out there I dig, but I'm spaazing about putting together a solid links list. I just keep blanking.

Also, if you bought any handspun from me and you've made something with it, let me know if you'd like to be part of a handspun FO gallery I've got planned.

Speaking of crafty fun, have you guys seen this? Very cool. LoriO sent me the link a while back and I filed it away as something to look at more in depth when I had time, then Amy refreshed my memory today. It's really fun to browse all the neat stuff, and it benefits greyhounds, hooray!

Snowball has learned how to get on the couch and bed all by himself. And he's got "sit" pretty much down. The housetraining...well, we're having a relapse on that one. Thank goodness for modern chemistry and Bissell. But how could I not love this face?

I'm working on developing a knit wool doggie "soaker" pattern.

No, not really.

Well.

2005-11-15T20:56:00.000-08:00

(Sorry, couldn't think of a better title.)

From what Heidi's Shoebutton said, and from what the rest of you who can see my blog said, and since everybody else can apparently see MJ's button but me, I have concluded that this thing came in piggyback on either iGive's Shopping Window or eTrust's Internet Security Suite, since I installed both of them around the same time I started experiencing the "trouble." If you've installed iGive's Shopping Window, d'ya mind taking a look at the source code of any page you are viewing in your web browser? Same with eTrust users, if'n you don't mind. The rogue javascript appears just above the style end tag in the header. Lemme know, m'kay?

(BTW, in case you don't know how to view the source code [and this is by far the most useful blogging tool I know] in IE it's under the Tools menu, "View Source" and in Mozilla you can just hit CTRL+U [although it is also under the Tools menu, if you aren't into keyboard shortcuts]. This way, you can see the cool things people do to make the cool things you are seeing in the browser.)

Moving on to More Important Things

Which is to say, dog stuff.

The role of a foster parent is to help the fostered become adoptable. To engender good habits, teach important living skills, good manners and so one and such forth.

Um, yeah.

Since we pretty much figure GAC has forgotten all about Snowball, we're not stressin' out about "adoptable."

He's learning to sit. He's learned to pee in the yard, and not mark anywhere but there. Mostly.

He has been taught some bad habits.

Shredding paper.

Barking at cats.

Devouring porn.

He pulled this out from wherever it had been and shredded it.

"Take that for airbrushing out clitorises!" he seemed to say.
Good boy.
I don't generally object to porn, but this issue was lame.
And seriously, only one model apparently had a clitoris which escaped the attentions of their airbrusher.

On a Less Google-magnetic Note...

On Friday I picked up all the dogbeds in our little living room and tossed them on the couch so I could vacuum. Libélula decided to recreate a childhood fairytale:

The Princess and the Pea

She looks comfy, eh? Then I turned on the vacuum:

And they huddled together for safety. Really, the great sucking noise machine might just possibly try to kill them someday. So you can't blame them.

Snowball slept through most of the vacuuming. He was at GAC for about 8 months and we vacuum the kennel about 4 times a day, so he's pretty well socialised to the sound and sight of it.

Knitting and Spinning

I've been doing a fair bit of both. I've started a project which would annoy Nancy greatly, so I won't show it here (and really, I can't show it, for the same reason I'm not posting about where we went on Saturday), and I'm slowly plugging away at the ribbing on Tahoe's sweater.

Speaking (typing) of dog sweaters, I totally spaced out on going to the Knitting for Dogs book signing and fashion show at Knitting in La Jolla, attended by such dignitaries as Marnie (she's spinning now, check it out) and MamaScrapalotta and their dogs.

A lot of dogs; it looks like we missed out on some serious dress-up fun, Mom, I'm sorry I spaced. The author's blog also has a lot of pictures of the event if you scroll down.

Sort of Knitting and Spinning Related

I have finally got the shop up and sort of working.

Of course, I have to assume that you guys can see the pics of the stock, and that pages are loading the way they should.

I gave up on figuring out osCommerce, ZenCart and the mysteries of php, cgi, api, soap, whatever for now and am just using Paypal's basic build a button, cut and paste it, basic shopping cart thingy.

So please, please, please let me know if you are playing on the site and you get a weird 404 or malfunction, because with this javascript thing, I don't really know how stuff is displaying or if malfunctions are from the virus or not.
I've also placed a button for the shop in my sidebar. Can you see it? This thing is strange, like being selectively blind.

Anyway, everything's table-based, I hope it loads and displays okay. I'll do a css navbar and stylesheet soon so everything will load faster, I promise.

The "glacier and stone" merino/silk two ply is what I've spun up most recently, along with the muppet yarn, and I have to say, if nothing else comes from Lanas de Libélula, it is really fun to play with all the different fibers.

And as always, I'm wide open to suggestions. If you'd like to see something, or think something looks terrible, or...anything really, let me know.

Updated to add: Oi, definitely a case of seeing the same things over and over again and not really seeing them, and a MAJOR case for a navbar css thing...I went through all the pages and changed "handpsun.html" to "handspun.html" like it should have been. I couldn't see the difference last night, 'though I looked and looked. I had chalked it up to this virus thing. Thanks Krys!

I throw myself upon the mercy of the tech gods

2005-11-14T22:05:00.000-08:00

I suddenly have a little piece of javascript that is appearing in the header between the style tags of all my pages. At first, I thought it was just the pages I had created, that it had something to do with my host. Then I started looking at the source for EVERY web page I visit and I see the nasty little bugger there too.

<script language='javascript' src='http://127.0.0.1:1040/js.cgi?pca&r=4639'> </script>

It doesn't seem to do anything but eat img src tags.

When I view this blog, I see only 6 of the numerous blog buttons, and it ate all the pics of my stuff in stock on my shop pages...but is it just me? Can you see yummyyarn's button?

When I view the page source, the img src tags are missing from the ones I can't see...so it makes sense that I can't see them, but these are not changes I made.

I can re-imput all the missing img src tags, but it just eats them again, and I never stuck this thing up there to begin with, and don't know how to get rid of it, and don't know where the hell it's from. I just want it to go away (and know how to kill it if it tries to come back).

I would think it was spyware, but I've run ad-aware and that hasn't stopped it. I see it in IE, I see it in Mozilla.

Help!

It's driving me b@t$h!t. It's not a long drive for me to Guanoland, but still, please, please help if you can.

Aah! Paypal & osCommerce/ZenCart you are killing me! AKA a completely boring post all about the shop and spinning

2005-11-13T00:18:00.000-08:00

Seriously, I have a hard enough time putting together a website as it is, I don't need weird issues with Paypal and open source shopping cart programs that somehow eat all the pictures of my stock (the code is still there, but it's as if they were never part of the table and it's because of some stupid javascript cgi style sheet crap thing one of the carts inserted at the top of all the pages) or won't install at all. Although, better to not install at all than to install, ruin the look of the site, then refuse to allow me access to uninstalling you. Bastages.

On the brighter side, I am enjoying the fruits of my ordering. I've spun up that wintery merino-silk and it's on the plying bobbin now.

And since I just wouldn't feel right if I was selling stuff I didn't know intimately and love, I'm spinning up a bit of everything. And while I'm annoyed by all the fiddly computer bits, I love this "excuse" to self-indulgence.

Here's the big fun stuff news though: I bought another wheel.

I actually bought it for Lanas de Libélula to have a rental wheel, but until the site is functional and ready to be unveiled...this Louët S17 is all mine.

It's a kit which has to be assembled, but it really isn't very difficult. The directions are certainly better than the assembly instructions were for the Mazurka.

It comes in the wee-est box with a carrying handle on it, perhaps 3 inches thick, and three feet by four feet.

Whippet provided for scale.

Once you open it up, you spread stuff out in two halves and...

all the fiddly bits

and

I am really surprised by this wheel.

I think it's a great beginner wheel--it treadles incredibly easily with true heel-toe action in the single treadle, adjusting tensions is easy (it's bobbin lead) with a poly stretch drive band, it's relatively easy to put together, it comes with a free half pound of fiber (the Louët people pick it and put it in the box; on the invoice it was going to be grey Icelandic, but it showed up Dark BFL [which I love as it's the softer kind of BFL and I already have an amount I'm planning to spin up for plying for a cabled sweater]), it comes with three bobbins and an attached lazy kate, and the bobbins are 8 oz. bobbins! Which is frickin' amazing, since 8 oz. is Lendrum's idea of jumbo and you have to have a whole other drive band, flyer head and bobbin to wind that much on. It's really their plying head.

Anyway, I spun more and spun faster on the S17 than I ever have on either the Mazurka or Lendrum...but I did spin thick.

Imagine this times two, in about two hours. A pound of South African Fine Wool, spun thick and thin.

The Louët wheels are made to spin thicker yarns, but they have special bobbins for lace-weight spinning with finer whorls, and you can cross the yarn over the hooks to slow the take for spinning lace, so this is a wheel you can use forever...but at the same time...it's not.

If you want to spin lace, probably not the right wheel.

But for DK to bulky, it's great. In fact I was trying to get the take up even more and with the fatty yarn I was spinning, too tough a take-in didn't seem like a problem.

I've been of the opinion for a while that there is no "perfect" wheel for the beginner, that there's just the wheel you can afford to learn on, then the one you research, save for, try out and splurge on. Kind of like cars. Your first car teaches you the skills, and teaches you what you want in the next one.

Anyway, since I've moaned on an on and sounded like an ad, here's what I didn't like:

it comes unfinished and there are some rough bits (they include sandpaper and all the tools you need to put it together except for a flathead screwdriver [which is weird, since they include a nice phillips head screwdriver] and the glue clamp, but I just sat on the crosspiece for fifteen minutes instead of clamping it, so there wasn't any need) and the unfinished wood really sucks up the lemon oil.

Although you can adjust the take-in, and move it to a different whorl, there isn't a ton of fine-tuning of spinning you can do. With what's out of the box, most of the control is in your treadling.

Let's face it, this is not a pretty wheel. It looks like the remedial geometry teacher banged the woodshop teacher and they had a crafty lil bastard.

Of course, I thought these wheels were ugly (which is one reason I got a Mazurka for my first wheel) but putting this thing together, I love the canvas that the big flat solid wheel and its block of a treadle actually are.

If I hadn't been in such a hurry to put it together and try it out, I would have decorated it, with something like one of those hypnotic swirly pinwheels, or the Vitruvian Man

or a celtic circle (artwork by Carol Sexton)

or, painted it black and done a glow-in-the-dark representation of our spiral galaxy, or, more locally and small scale,

The possibilities of customization are a little overwhelming. I'm open to design suggestions too; I know that I will be painting this wheel, I just don't know what design will win my heart.

So I stick to the smaller canvas of yarn at the moment. Here are the two half-pound skeins I made after dyeing, one blue, purple & green, and the other orange and red.

I just think it's interesting the way yarn looks in the skein v. the ball.
Anyway, I've plied up a Lendrum "jumbo" bobbin of it and...what do you think? One minute I like it and think it's a fun quirky rainbow ply yarn, and the next I think it's hideous and ill-conceived.

I left the price sticker on the bobbin, 'cuz that's just how I roll.
(remember price tags still on hats "gang" fashion?)

When the bobbin is whirring and blurring, the color is a light purpley-pink wine color, oddly enough.

I'm going to wash it and the merino/silk tomorrow to set the twist.

And tomorrow I'll have pics of doggy doings. The non-poopy kind.

Don't forget to vote!

2005-11-08T11:48:00.000-08:00

It seems like I have been spending a ton of time on the computer lately, but not much time here. I'm really excited about something I've been doing and I can't wait to show you, hopefully by the end of the week. Hint: it has something to do with the removal of my etsy shop button.

Sunday was fun, Nancy has a nice breakdown of it with good pics. I honestly wasn't going to buy anything, because my Secret Pal sent me a nice package with anti-stink stuff & a lint brush (she really has my number ;)) and a pound of lovely dark green merino fiber to spin.

But Village SpinWeave was there, and had one Lendrum jumbo bobbin, so I had to get that.

And then I lost my mind.

This was a four and a half pound bag of Lincoln-Targhee cross for sale on consignment with the Morro Fleece Works booth and I just couldn't stop digging my hands into the CLEAN gooey lanolin-y loveliness that was "Eloise."

Even though I'd been blabbering to Nancy about how the effort of raw fleece just doesn't make sense money and time-wise not an hour earlier.

I have been wanting to try spinning in the grease for a while, and I think the nasty eBay experiences kind of compounded the desire. And then, I saw Eloise's silver patch and that was that.

I just love shepherd(esse)s who coat their sheep. I know there's some controversy over it, but I don't care. I love you guys for it, and I love those relatively vm-less locks.

I have more to blather about, but less time. Here's a pic of Snowball's bed the other day:

The stuffed ferret? Okay, normal toy, after all, I bought it for Belu (our "little weasel").

My sneaker? Okay, still within the normal dog plaything range, although not exactly appropriate. He grabs the laces in his mouth and shakes it fiercely, thus giving himself quite a headkicking.

But a roll of pennies? Where did you even get that from, kiddo?

Weirdo greyhound.

I set up an album for him on flickr, but this is my favourite pic of him on there:

The Power of the Internet(s)

2005-11-01T13:52:00.000-08:00

Caroline found the exact "Book Magic" (that was the silly name I was thinking of) doo-dad and Inky linked in the comments to something only different in shaping of the front T. Fast results and freedom from fear of losing it and not having a replacement, hooray for the internet and great schmartypantses like you guys!

I know I mentioned iGive.com in passing before, but since the holidays are coming up and since I do almost all my shopping online (I just don't like malls. My MIL told me I "have issues" [with same inflection as "you are a pile of shit"] but strangely, it didn't change how I feel about malls. Nick and I were walking through Fashion Valley and passed two girls and overheard, "Well we hate everybody who shops there, so whatever." and that comic moment kind of encapsulates why I don't like malls/mall culture. Plus, they are designed to keep you inside the structure as long as possible so you'll spend more money, the architecture often makes getting out in a hurry difficult. Try to get off the top floor of Horton Plaza in under five minutes, and unless you started right by one of the two stairwells, good luck. How do you feel about being trapped in a crowded mall during an earthquake/shooting/worst case scenario? It's southern California, after all. Anything can happen. And maybe I'm just a smidge paranoid. ;P) I thought I'd pass the link along.

Almost every place I've spent money at online is there, with the exception being the little independent crafters, although finding a specific shop is sometimes a little clunky, as a search of a store name brings up a lot more than just the shop link.

You can look through shopping categories too, if you know what you want but don't know where you want to buy it.

And unless you download their shopping window, you have to click through to the store's site through iGive's site.

But once you are at the shop's site, it's just like normal, except that the shop donates a percentage of your purchase to an iGive account in the name of a charity you designate and once more than $25 is accumulated, they send a check to your charity. You don't pay any extra, (I guess there are even tax deductions available) and they have a lot of special coupon codes and deals available through their partnership with iGive.

So, anyway, I think it's pretty cool. Buy the stuff you would anyway, but your charity gets a piece of the pie too.

A Monstrous Mish-Mash

2005-10-31T23:58:00.000-08:00

Thanks everyone for all your nice comments about the pottery!

We love the process, and we are loving our little products. All those knitters and spinners out there know how good it feels to use something you made with your own hands, something that isn't exactly like anything out there, something that feels exactly right and sensuously tactile in your hands.

Although it still hurts (just a wee, wee bit) when I have to throw out a pot because I just trimmed a big ol' hole in it. But since I have plenty of experience ripping nearly done but not quite right hand knit garments I can be a big girl about it.

And I love that feeling of pushing the clay down on the wheel, having it centered and solid. I wish somebody could do that to me.

In an unexpected plus, just these few pieces have drastically decreased the amount of daily dishes. Instead of using a bowl, setting it in the sink, later getting another, setting it in the sink...I keep rewashing our two bowls and we are sharing the mug. The dogs go through more dishes than we do now.

The Amazing Doo-dad

I bought this little thing at Powell's bookstore in Portland and now I live in fear that I'll lose it and have to drive all the way back up there to get another one. And given how I get lost, that'll take the rest of my unnatural life. The Chosen People got nothin' on me.

I can't find it anywhere on their website and I tossed the packaging in Portland so I don't know what brand name it runs by. I seem to remember it being something silly.

It's the simplest thing, like a doubled T shape paper clip, but it rocks my world. I love being able to knit and read; before I had to pin a paperback on a clipboard and their screams of agony from their cracking paper spines haunted me when I closed my eyes at night.

While this holds the book open and somewhat flat, it's not as rough on the spine.

Here's what it looks like, waiting for the next Terry Pratchett:

Okay, so what's my point? Please, if anybody knows what the heck this little thing was called so I can get some more, I'd be much obliged.

Some Knitting Going On

I set down Tahoe's sweater 'cuz I started worrying about messing it up. Life's too short to stress about knitting, so I picked up something easier:

This corkscrew scarf pattern is a good one for knitting while reading. Once you've done a few wedges, you feel it all in your fingers and don't need to look at it at all.

I'm not really sure I like it in this yarn though. It's a really luscious soft 50% superfine alpaca, 50% pima cotton from Class Elite that I bought at The Naked Sheep in Portland and dyed with indigo (lots of little flaky chunks are still in the yarn, and a faint gerbilpiddle scent lends authenticity) and dipped in fustic in an attempt at a blue-green variegated skein, and I'm not sure I like how it turned out. I'd hate to overdye it with synthetics though, somehow that seems wrong.

I noticed that a fair amount of people are brought to my journal by the search string "loop-d-loop ruffled scarf free pattern" or some variation thereof.

There's a couple of free ruffled scarf patterns out there that are fairly similar, one in pdf form from Knitscene that seems a damn sight more complicated than it needs to be, and one from Crystal Palace done lengthwise, but I haven't seen any exactly like it. Certainly none as easy and dead simple once any fear of short rows is conquered.

So here's some hints, and if you can figure out how it was made by the hints and pics, than good for you.

If you can't, but you're still dying to make it, I really do suggest you splurge on the book. Overstock.com has it for under $20, but it's well worth the thirty clams retail from your local independent knit shop.

It's a very pretty book, despite some of the odd expressions on the models' faces (is he $hitting his pants or being "sexy"?) and my favourite thing is that while the patterns are fun, and some are silly and border on the "er, um, yes, you can knit that, but, er, why?" variety it's more about the techniques and fostering a flexibility of thinking, using standard design techniques in a bit of a new way (steeks, short rows) and simple variations to make something very different. Sometimes I don't like the way it looks, but I really like that approach.

Anyway, here's a pic of two pattern repeats.

It's just a series of wedges created by short rows, all pointing in the same direction to make that addictive to knit spiral.

It's all garter stitch, not even picking up and knitting the wraps. Super, super simple, no picking up stitches, or increasing and decreasing or anything tedious like that. Of course, I guess even wedge-shaped garter stitch can get tedious, but the novelty still hasn't worn off for me. A f-cking fabulous stashbuster pattern, it doesn't take a ton of yardage, even if you are trying to worry about gauge and exactly recreating the pattern and all that palaver. It works well no matter how many stitches you cast on, once you've got the short row wedge thing down.

Anyway, I thought I'd explore a different style of short rowing and better familiarise myself with the shaping of a sock, as I've really only ever completed one miserable looking baby sock in horrid pink acrylic--oh, look! There it is, being used as waste yarn for a provisional cast on! Ick yarn, it squeaks when you work with it but it was so soft in the ball. We've all been there, eh?
It's barely worthy to be waste yarn next to the fun Tanglewood handspun (really pushing the yarn snobbery envelope there, I think):

I'm going to go up a needle size or two, I think. I wanted a thick sock, but it's a bit much on US6s. Plus, I messed up picking up the stitches. I was following a pattern (for a baby sock) and the stitches to be picked up were way too few for the length of the flap, although up till then all was working well fit-wise. I'm going to swatch a bit more and restart using a fair bit of guidance from this web document.

Speaking of screwing up following a pattern & picking up stitches, I'm having an absolute c&nt of a time picking up the right amount of stitches for the collar of my Noro Butterfly.

I've done at least six attempts and I wobble back and forth between way too few picked up, way too many picked up, and close to the amount called for in the pattern but worrying that the distribution is uneven and I'll knit the danged thing lopsided.

I also messed up on the garter stitch edging for the fronts. Yeah, I forgot to do them. Completely missed it in the pattern.

I even thought to myself, "huh, in the picture they have garter stitch edges. Stupid bastards forgot to mention that in the pattern, eh?

No, some other unnamed stupid bastard needs to pay a little more attention to the details. Chalk it up to the drawback of a dead easy pattern repeat, it kind of lulls you into that state of, "la, la, dee dah, I got this down, it's flowin', da da da...more of the same, just like the back & the sleeves, dee-diddle-deedle..."

I didn't even see the "missing" instructions until I was almost done with the second half of the front. D'oh!
I'm hoping to get away with single crochet to keep it from rolling and clean up the edge.

Ooh, speaking/typing of crochet, I'm signing up for a lesson at Lakeside Knits on Thursday. It's only fifteen bucks for an hour and half and I've been telling myself I need to learn more than just single crochet, but every time I sit down to read a crochet pattern I suddenly find something else which urgently requires my attention.

I may crochet nothing more challenging than a buttload of coasters, but I'm looking forward to it. And completely refraining from making any jokes about becoming a hooker. I'm a sex professional thank you very much.

Okay, one last knitting thing. Tahoe's sweater is bugging me.

BTW, I even have a whole book of sweaters for dogs (and half of the southwestern blanket sweater in a bag somewhere), but I saw Ellie's and I had to take a stab at doing my own non-boringly ribbed in the round version. So I blame Mary. ;P

I measure his chest at one moment and, "oh no, start the shaping for the legs and turning it NOW!" And I measure again, and, "oh, a few more inches before I have to worry, don't want it to be too tight." Dammit. It depends on whether he's sitting up or laying down (the default state of the hound). I resolve to stop worrying and just knit it. I am definitely digging the way it's striping up and how good it feels in my hands.

Dye-diddly-eying

I had a couple of dyeing days this weekend, and I actually dyed in colors other than blue and green.

I took a whole bunch of pics that look awful, but there's a lot of flame colorway, some cherries and plums, and this cool black purple russet kettle dyed skein of Louet's thick and thin 100% wool. I'm almost positive this is the same yarn that Colinette uses. I've been told they have a mill of their own, but it looks the damn same to me.

I also made an expensive stupid mistake:

Aaaaaaaaah!!!!Acidified water in my ph paper, gah! Ten bucks down the drain (though not really, as I feel I got a fair amount of use before I wrecked it. But I hate it when I do something so careless and stupid that costs me money, instead of my usual pain-and-embarrassment variety of consequences).

Luckily there's a rawfood place nearby that stocks it, so I don't have to place an order with Dharma Trading just for that.

Web Twaddle

I've been fiddling with building an online shop of my own. I spent over an hour today building a table for the front page that ended up looking...just awful. Really, no words.

I really like the simplicity of Hello Yarn's site, who's actually doing a lot of the same stuff I'd like to do (and doing it a lot better obviously ;)).

Anybody out there want to share with me their favourite shop sites, and maybe a little bit of why they like the way it looks? Ease of use, cleanliness of line...it's all stuff I'm going for but I'm such a clutterbug, even in web design.

I downloaded OSCommerce (what handpaintedyarns.com uses) and for some reason it really bugged me, it didn't feel like home at all, even though it's really easy to use and has a ton of nifty calculators and trackers and whizzbang doodads. It just seems like a great interface if you're selling machines or sunglasses or some mass produced product, but it doesn't have that organic, light, sentient, human feeling that Hello Yarn has.

Anyway, I hope everybody had a good Halloween. Because of the dogs we set up an honour system basket hanging from a tree outside our gate...if we were in a cartoon there'd be a huge box above it, it looks quite suspicious just hanging there, like any second it's going to trigger a Wile E. Coyote style trap.

I definitely didn't see any costumes as cute as these.

Who's up for a wee roadtrip?

2005-10-27T17:51:00.000-07:00

Anybody want to carpool up to Torrance for aWeaving & Spinning Festival on November 6th?

¡Adios Audrey!

2005-10-24T23:48:00.000-07:00

On Saturday I put the little red wheel in my little red wagon and drove Audrey up to meet her new owner Susan.
We met up at NobleKnits. It's a shop that seemed to be doing great business and had the largest stock of Colinette or Prism I've seen. And Classic Elite's cashmere-silk blend, which I didn't even know they had. All in all, a nice selection of luxury yarns. It was nice to meet you Susan!

Looks like honey, smells like sheep

Before I left Oceanside I stopped at the Boney's market there. Wow. Their Boney's is nice! The Boney's in La Mesa seems more like a depository for rotting produce. Anyway, they had gigantic figs and a huge floofy stuff (body products) section, where I bought some liquid lanolin and cedarwood oil for making an emulsion for oiling my fleece before I comb it. And the lanolin's pretty good for the skin, yep.

Artsy-Fartsy Dabblers

Nick and I have been taking a ceramics class Monday nights at Plum Pottery in South Park. We've been having a blast and I love the shapes Nick has been making. I'm not so impressed with my own stuff, but I'm having a good time getting covered in clay, so I figure that's what counts. We just got some bowls back after glazing, these first four pics are of Nick's beautiful bawls, er, bowls:

I called "dibs" on this bowl from the moment I saw it after he trimmed it. And it's glazed in my favourite colors, with all blue inside.

This one looked kind of like a flowerpot, but with the glaze on, I'm not sure. I think we'll be chugging coffee from it. I love the streaky red inside.

My bowls are both blue and green. I tried to make fun shapes. This one is about the size of my palm and trimmed to be kind of beveled all around (I used some sort of a grater, like a large bore lemon zester) but I didn't get it very even. But I like it anyway. No idea what I'll do with it. Sauce bowl?

This one's larger, like a curvy cereal bowl.

I like what we've made, but more than that I'm really enjoying the process. I love learning something new with Nick.

Knitting Stuff

The Noro Butterfly from handspun has been relegated to take-along/idiot knitting status. I've got all done but the left front, collar and finishing, so not really in the home stretch yet, but I saw Ellie's new sweater and was really motivated to start the sweater out of green superwash for Tahoe. I'm making it up as I go, but taking detailed notes, so I hope to be able to recreate it (or change what didn't work) in later versions. I'm trying to do it in the round, and working a bit like a giant sock, but we'll see. There's a part of me that is thinking that all the trouble of trying to figure out the odd angles of dog chest and legs fit in the round isn't worth the trouble it is to seam something knit in the flat. But I really don't like seaming, so we'll see how it ends up.

Working at a Local Yarn Store no more

I quit today. Actually, I quit about three weeks ago, if you count giving notice as quitting.
I hate quitting, but it boiled down to me feeling like I was putting in a hell of a lot more effort and care into her shop than she was, with none of the actual control over what I was becoming so closely associated with. And since it's a little late to get dooced, I might as well record a teensy bit of my reasons.

I felt bad, because I know people depend on having a knowledgeable person at their LYS they can get help from but, geez. I just got a little tired of coming in early to make sure the place was clean by opening time (picking up crayons, bits of yarn, candy wrappers, putting stuff back to where it was supposed to be, vacuuming and dusting, essentially, cleaning up after the owner and her kids as well as the basic shop cleaning) and staying late for people and end-of-day tidying and not being paid for the extra time I spent.

I'm not one of those, "huh, it's my scheduled time to go, drop what I'm doing and leave" kind of employees even for crap-paying retail jobs, and I kept getting this weird "you are taking advantage of me, you are so lucky I am paying you to do something you love, you aren't working" vibe from the owner, as if all I did was sit on my ass all day and knit. I love to knit, it's true. But I love to knit stuff for myself or my family that isn't terribly trendy, that won't melt, that isn't made in China.

When the owner's surprised to feel wool that "isn't scratchy," or is surprised that her stockinette stitch scarf curled, I start to feel like I'm part of a sham shop.

And other stuff, as if all this stuff doesn't already sound so petty. I think it may have been my conversation with the new employee and teacher on Friday which was the last straw that finally made me grow a spine and tell the LYSO "I think you should consider...I don't work for you anymore." I mean, three weeks ago I gave my two weeks notice and told the LYSO she should hire someone else, and told her that I had to leave but she still kept trying to schedule me, I'm such a doormat. She set off hinky alarm bells during the interview, but I'd thought, "cool! Work in a LYS, get to know the real market!"

Anyway. The encounter with the new teacher/LYSE:
I am "all about" embracing the different kinds of knitters out there; if all you ever want to knit your whole life is fuzzy novelty scarves, good for you.

But if someone comes to the shop and plunks down $55 for four hours of beginning knitting instruction, you'd better not be casting on for them, you'd better teach them more than the knit stitch and come up with a better answer for a student's request for help in identifying mistakes and correcting them than "oh, well, your first scarf's just a practice piece anyway" or "you totally won't be able to tell." By the end of four hours, 80% of my students were able to cast on, knit, purl, rib, identify a twisted stitch, pick up a dropped stitch, decrease two ways (k/p2tog, ssk), increase three ways (yo, bar increase, and the one where you knit the front and back of the stitch) cast off, weave in the ends and make goddamn fringe for fuck's sake. I just think taking people's money to teach them nearly nothing is wrong.

Anyway, I taught the LYSO how to do short rows to finish the corkscrew scarf, gave her the shop keys, argued with her about her attempt to short me on last week's pay, and skedaddled.

Stunned by how much I don't know.

2005-10-21T22:27:00.000-07:00

Hey out there in SchmartyPahntz Verld, how can I back up all my spaazlicious blogbits onto a disk?

Update: A-ha! For once I actually managed to find the answer in the help database! It's a crazy world. Seriously, like one out of a hundred times does this happen.

FOs which don't belong to me. And some UFOs too.

2005-10-21T00:06:00.000-07:00

I apologise sincerely in advance for the intensely crappy photography despite my overendowed camera. If you want to see beautiful photos on a knitblog, go here.

I just want to prove that I do still knit, since I didn't knit as much as I expected to in PDX (what all the hepcats call Portland, don'tcha know) and had no personal FO to show upon return. Here are some things I've done for the local shop between attempting to coerce old ladies to actually buy something not just ask my opinion on every single ball of yarn in the shop and how it would knit up in X stitch pattern paired with Y yarn and how much would be needed to make Z project...and two hours later, walking out with nothing.
Enjoy the free a/c Mrs. Wilson!

Anyway.

Here's a pic of the most Tedious Shawl Ever.

What's so wrong with me that I knit this pattern to spec but ended up with two untouched balls of Nubbles and barely into the second two $12/ball Iceland colors out of the shawl kit?
Yeah, well, YMMV, I guess. Hmmmm...cough ($100 kits)...cough, cough.

Foliage is actually a pretty cool Berrocco yarn. It's almost half wool! Gasp!

It's a patttern I made on the fly to show how the yarn knit up and the hat could fit an adult and used less than one ball. And it was fast. Somehow, knitting st st in the round is much less tedious than garter in the flat. Dunno why.

I've shown an in-progress pic of this awhile back:

This is a scarf done in CP's kid merino and Dragonfly. Started with three or four rows of the Dragonfly, switched to km as MC with a little intarsia of the Dragonfly to carry it along the sides, occasionally carrying it across and knitting it three stitches along the side.
It's my lame version of a necklace scarf, a pink and black punk scarf (sans safety pins).
Scale is hard to see, it's about four inches wide and five feet long.
Um, yeah.
It definitely needs to have the crap blocked out of it. On the to-do list, I guess.

And just to get the pink and black out of our system, here's this truly awful photo of a hat I'm actually quite proud of:

It's a kid's cabled hat, though it fits my noggin snug-wise. The black edging is a sc, the cables are diminishing as it decreases and I made it up as I went along. That Sirdar hoody I made waybackwhen made me love cabled ribbing as a function/style thing. I used less than a ball each of the pink and black Iceland, and I've got cabled gauntlets using the leftovers on my to-do list. I was going to write up the pattern for the shop but my chicken scratch notes on it disappeared. C'est la vie. I could read my knitting, but, meh.

This next one is still in progress, and not all the knitting is mine. I showed the LYSO owner how to knit it and she fell in love with how fast a "drop stitch" pattern is, so she's been working on it as well:

It's the "Ollie" scarf made of Quest out of the Berrocco pattern book with the woman and the dog in matching outfits made of Air on the cover.
Yeah, that one.
Anyway, here "drop stitch" really means "drop extra wraps from previous row" which is understandably not as catchy, but a little more clear.

Anyway, since I saw how well the LYSO was doing with it, I felt free to start something new from GGH's Super Kid Mohair. Coincidentally, I chose the ruffled scarf from Teva Durham's Loop-d-Loop which in the book is made from Berrocco's Quest.
OOooooohh. Okay, not really much of a twilight zone moment, but in the shop, we have to make our own excitement.
I guess.
Between the old lady action and all.

It's addictive, this little fuzzy short row mohair thing.

Three wedges in this pic, but by the time I left for the day I had a corkscrew of about six inches. It's fun --I used a US11 to get gauge. And, the mohair still sheds, but not like the Quest, and not like a lot of the mohair yarns out there do, much less 'cuz of that chain stitch construction.
Which can only be done really by machine. Sigh. But it's soft, and I'm looking forward to feeling it all knit up and coiled around my neck like a foofy-snake.

Even if it has to stay in Bonita.

"It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again."

2005-10-17T20:52:00.000-07:00

Portland was fun with a capital F!

At the last minute I decided to not bring the gigantic camera, so I haven't any Portland pics, and strangely we ran across no postcard shops with copyrighted images I could scan and claim as my own.

The lack of postcard hawkers on every corner was just one small difference between San Diego and Portland.

The no sales tax thing never stopped being thrilling.

Powell's was fabulously labyrinthine (I never even made it up to the Pearl Room) and despite the fact that books don't make the best choice of souvenirs, I couldn't resist. I ended up running through the airport with a fifty-pound pack on my back, listening to the high pitched "eee-ee-ee-eee!" complaints of its myriad nylon support straps.

Heidi staggered behind wearing her own overloaded pack and clutching an empty basket. Quite a nice basket, if I may say.

(Okay, this next bit's quite long but if you get bored you can just scroll down to the pictures I took after we got back of the yarn adventures)

I think if you'd had an overhead camera filming our last day it would have looked like some sort of farce:
get up, get lost, find the freeway, lose the freeway, find the right road again, sit behind several construction projects, get to Tillamook, sprint up to Munson Falls, "ooh," "aah," and engage in good-spirited recriminations regarding the camera's location in the rental car, race back to Portland wondering what those gigantic white plastic-wrapped things were, (more sitting behind construction projects), downtown, "lunch" in a too-sugary gelato place just 'round the corner from Anthropologie where we marveled that there was a great amount of work put into garments that were made of not so great materials, although I still paused from time to time to rub my grubby fingerprints in and Heidi and I enjoyed the range of grimaces the shopgirls were capable of producing.

Then, up to my cousin's house to retrieve my forgotten phone.

Then to the airport, oops, here's the airport but we must fill up the car's tank lest we pay $4.09/gallon.

Crazy traffic, unclear road signs and my stubborn, manly refusal to pull over, stop driving, and take a look at a damn map make the ensuing hour or so a bit of a blur really.

Heidi assures me we passed my cousin's house at least twice.

A very slow rental shuttle ride.

Then the great overloaded dash through the airport.

Only to find that the plane (which should have been securing its doors and pushing back from the gate when we got there, according to my definition of "on time" Mr. Flight Screen Information Updater Person) had arrived just before we did, and they were still hosing down the cowchips, or whatever it is they do between Southwest flight runs.

So Heidi finally got to use the restroom.

So the story has a happy ending.

And it was funny and farcical and frustrating (I could almost hear the Benny Hill dee-dee-deedle-dee music going and if we'd driven past my cousin's house a couple more times I would have started hallucinating girls in bikinis and gorilla masks)while it was happening, but I now know that I should never leave less than a two hour buffer between activities which involve any amount of driving in Oregon.
Because although Portland apparently has the second highest unemployment rate, it does have more than its fair share of road crew and road sign meddlers-with-ers. Wossname, taggers, sign twisters, stealers, and an odd affinity for placing road signs so you can only read 'em if you are driving the wrong way down a one way.

We did seek out a few yarn stores and a dissappointing bead shop (well, we didn't know Let It Bead was dissappointing until we got there) and even ran into a former San Diegan on the bus.

Yarn Garden was huge. And so overwhelming I only bought a bag to hold my Powell's haul in.
knit-knot was not. But it did carry handspun. I bought this, 185 yds of bulky-worsted, little sections of dk-ish 2ply superwash at a price I found absolutely encouraging: $43. Worth every goddamn penny, I had such a hard time picking which skein.

I was thinking of seeing if I could make a dogsweater of it, but I think all the dogs are too big, even if it was all blah stockinette. So maybe socks.

The Naked Sheep was very neat, my kind of shop were I to take such a gamble. It's a small shop but they have nice sheepy wools, not many novelties, Rowan, Debbie Bliss, baby yarns in soft superwash and a nice selection of sock yarns. Some wonderfully soft alpaca / pima cotton blend I ruined with natural dye (kidding, Heidi, just kidding!).

Geez, already this is kind of long. Maybe I should save the natural dye stuff for a whole separate entry. Here's a preview of the dyeing we did. Heidi and I both did fibers, so this is all our stuff together, drying in the sun. Everything got jammed into my pack still soggy.

And this is what I've done since I got home:

Green and blue mostly worsted weight superwash, 470 yards/ 8 ounces for a sweater for Tahoe. Totally inconsistent gauge, but I love it. The superwash feels supersoft.

And, I came home to two great packages which should be separate entries all their own. But here goes anyways:
My brother sent us some really quirky stuff, some great dog toys (Snowball LOVES the glow in the dark slobber ball) doughnut scented air freshener for Nick, bacon band-aids (again, for my accident-prone Pig I'm assuming) a funky cutting board and knife I'm still getting the hang of, some tunes, a great bunch of surprises.

And my Secret Pal Mama Llama sent me a package too, but the dogs opened it in the yard and so I had Nick open the rest of it over the phone when I was in Portland. Chicken tenders for the dogs (taste-testing has proven them to be of higher value than the greenies--if offered a greenie and a chicken tender in one hand the chicken tender is snatched first 100% of the time, which is amazing if you've ever seen Tahoe spaaz out to just the word "greenie") and some fabulous hand-mixed trail-mix (devoured quite quickly) some gear for kitchen communications and three ounces of BFL and a cute card. It was great to come back and play with pressies, and unpack all the fun stuff we got...I'd go away more if it didn't mean all the hassle of leaving home ;)

I'd take a picture of all the loot, but it's been disseminated to various parts of the house--or yard, or stomachs. I've even spun up the BFL to 130 yards of singles. I'm not a very good blogger. Sorry.

Oh, and while the natural dye stuff will wait for a post of its own, I should sort of explain the title of this post--I think I'd like to raise silk worms (which are caterpillars, not small worms at all really) and I was daydreaming about the habitat I'd create for them and for some reason that line persisted in my brain. It would be peace silk, after all, so we'd be a little over-run with the silk moths maybe. Definitely something I need to read more up on, that's for sure.

So tired.

2005-10-12T00:23:00.000-07:00

Portland.

I love you.

I hate you.

No sales tax!

Impose sales tax--implement better road signage!

Portland. Seriously, knock it off with the screwy signage already.

No, really.

Well, hello 82nd Street! Again. What's with eastbound freeways that take you five miles south before you can get off of them?

A good-natured laid-back traveling companion is worth her weight in gold.

And what's with Shell being the only fueling option in the last stop before the rental car return?

And having some kid who looks like an afterschool special reject take my credit card insisting it's illegal to fuel my own vehicle in Oregon?

And what's with this domestic car having its gasflap on the passenger's side anyway? When the f--- did that happen?

So tired.

So happy to be home.

Totally f----g random, generally unintelligible

2005-10-05T21:17:00.000-07:00

(an actual grocery list I found in my notebook:)

pliers
paper towels
bleach
vaseline

*********

what I love (no particular order except for the first and maybe the second [sorry mom & Belu])
Nick
Tahoe
Belu
Mom
Snowball
Crivvie

*********

what unnerves me:

I know many bloggers better than my own neighbors (why did she run down to Severin? I still don't know. What's his name? Is her name Barbara? Who the hell are these people? And why are they out working in their garages at 3am? What is he building in there?)

Well, at least I know how many bloggers represent themselves online, and all I know about my neighbors is that they love to park in front of our house. It must be the catpoop their free-range kitties leave in our iceplant which draws them in so aromatically.

*********

I'm packing for Portland and debating. Bring the fuzzy mohair sweatshirt? Or bring the more sensible fleece layers? Hmmmmm....

*********

Did you guys know Lantern Moon makes black sheep tape measures? I didn't. But they only put one in each order bag. So, there are definitely some unexpected perks to working in a little LYS where you are the only employee, even if there's no discount.

*********

I had a good time at Nancy's; I always do at these things. I'm not sure when I picked up the habit of rapid departures though; I suddenly realise how late it's getting, pack up my $h!t and go. In my family there's a tendency to linger forever saying goodbye, maybe that's why I have such a "head 'em, up move 'em out" backlash going on. Dunno. I know it can seem odd, but I can't seem to help it.

Here's the bobbin of superwash I finished later at home:

I'll ply it with the second half of the superwash (which has the blue bits in it) and make it into a sweater for Tahoe. It is a bit overwhelmingly green, but I love it. Green is a very lucky color, and I've been told, a holy color of Islam. Maybe I'll try to finish his sweater by the end of Ramadan.

*********

I'm really excited about Portland and this Natural Dye workshop, as it's something about which I know almost nothing. Just Powell's, just rain, just walking tours and a gentrifying city. I most likely won't be able to blog or even check e-mail, but I'm taking the big phallic-lensed camera with me so I should have at least a couple fun photos in the end. And a Powell's t-shirt. And one for mom. And the new Rushdie for Nick. And Neil Gaiman's latest for me, And Niffenegger's latest for mom and me. And maybe I'll find some gently used copies of Walker's stitch encyclopedias. Hell, I'll be lucky if I make it to the workshop.

*********

Oh, and my brother sent me this link to an article about LYS in Alaska:

Vera Obeseo, another retailer, is making yarn-based companionship part of her business plan. Obeseo, 41, opened her Palmer shop Fantastic Fibers in late 2003 in half a building. She bought the building last month and plans to expand into all 3,600 square feet as soon as her tenants leave in October.

"I'm adding a yarn cafe in the front," Obeseo said, where people can sip coffee, knit and chat. It will have a top-loading washing machine, necessary for felting projects that are all the rage, and a TV for husbands.

That sounds like a damn cool space.

Tales of a LYS

2005-09-29T11:42:00.000-07:00

Okay, remember Mike Meyers Coffee Talk voice? Please hear that Brooklyn Barbra voice for this next bit:

[Me]:"Le Stitch, this is Wendy, how can I help you?"

[Brooklyn Barbra from Bonita]:"Hello? I bought some mow-hair there and I'm knitting it and the pattern says, "See Oh Two-Six on You Ess Thirteen parenthesis Nine em em. What does that mean? Should I use the larger or the smaller size?"

It means that you should come in so I can show you how almost every needle made and distributed in the US has the brand name, the US size, and the needle's diameter in millimeters printed, stamped, embossed, engraved, whatevered onto it.
And then I can poke you with them, you silly cow.

Another call:
"Do you have afghan yarn? I'm making an afghan and do you have a silvery gray yarn?"

Um, yeah? We have lots of different yarns, lots of different colors (it is, after all, a LYS), so, um, maybe, yeah? Then the caller came in (disguised as a ribbed scarf knitter who had forgotten how to bind off and also needed to know how [and whether] to do fringe) and she seems really intent on recreating the exact patterned afghan her mother made.

Which I might try to make fun of, but it's sad really as she's not alone.

There seem to be lots of boomer generation ladies coming in, learning to knit, all to recreate the exact same ratty afghan their mother or grandmother made for them. I guess it's the whole wonderwoman thing--the career, the owned home, the nice cars, the forgotten "feminine arts?" Something they missed, a little nostalgia for a path not taken? I don't know, but it's not uncommon. Lots of stories of special blankets pass through the LYS.

Anyway, here are some pics of the stuff I've been up to:

Spinning.

This is that laceweight plied in different directions for experiments in making cabled yarns. We have three colorways, from L to R: blue/green, pink/muted purples, and "Hi, welcome to McDonald's can I take your order?"

Some knitting on personal time, the back of Noro's Butterfly:

Some dyeing (not blue and green!) on thick and thin millspun wool:

And my favorite, a stormy sky at night on a full moon type colorway:

I am so excited for this Sunday and Nancy's shindig. AND, I finally have a buyer for Audrey which is funny as I just dropped her off on Sunday at Jessica's place.

But, Susan's not in a hurry to pick it up, so Jessica has plenty of time to get used to/sick of the wheel and I've got lots of time to jinx the deal.

Because I love having half a closet taken up by reproachful (but prettily carved) bits of wood.