Tis better to dye with friends than to die alone

Over the holidays I visited with Lawre, my garden-buddy, and she showed me some beautiful blue faced leicester and silk roving she had received as a gift and said our friend Liz had also received a gift of the same fiber. I immediately recognized it as the same fiber I'd splurged on at MDSW this year. It was so soft and luminous - one of those over the top fiber blends that makes you cry with happiness to get to spin it. Liz & Lawre were getting together to dye theirs, and I thought it would be fun to join in with my ball of fluff too.

We debated sticking with our mutually favorite colorway of purple-blue-green, or trying to branch out. We settled on red-orange-yellow-purple for a fiery sunset kind of look. With exacting precision and consummate care we measured our dyes [excuse me, I have to get a towel to sop up the dripping sarcasm pooling around that last sentence]. We soaked the fiber in hot vinegary water, squooshed the water out, and laid the fiber on plastic wrap. Lawre went for a long zig zag snake, I spiraled mine in a long oval, and Liz chose short back and forth zig zags. We took turns filling big syringes with dye and squirting it onto our fiber.

I knew I was going to split the fiber in half lengthwise to spin. I had an idea that with a long color repeat it would be possible to have a 2 ply yarn where the colors stay pretty cleanly consistent. It makes sense in theory, I hope in practice it comes out as well as in my mind. I think Zauberball yarn does the same thing. I intended to have longer color segments, but my hands did what they wanted, and now that I'm spinning I think it was a wise move.

 I think I added way more dye than anyone else. I really wanted to avoid any white spots. By the end I was just free-pouring from the dye cups. Though the number of rinses it took to get all the excess dye out makes me think I overdid it a bit. But the colors didn't get muddied, which is all I really care about.

When the fiber finally cooled and dried (a VERY long process that makes you remember that wool is favored for its heat retention and moisture absorption), I was a bit disheartened. The colors were pretty, but the fiber was kind of matted and didn't slip and flow like it did originally. But after some serious predrafting and fluffing it was again wonderful to spin. The colors are a bit weird in this photo, everything should be much warmer colored.

A bit of wave from the wool crimp gives the yarn more life than straight top, and seeing the different colors turn into yarn is really fun. I'm spinning much more now than I have for the last year. Makes me think I need to dye some more fiber soon.

MDSW Roundup

I had such a good time at Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival (MDSW).  I stopped for amazingly good donuts on the way up.  I also stopped by a MAC store (no, not the Apple store, although they are side by side at that particular mall) and picked up a new ridiculous shade of bright blue/purple eyeshadow.  They still don't have a good green, but did find an emerald green cream eye pencil that will do nicely.  My rainbow is nearly complete! 

As I drove up my brother's street I saw several people having fun painting a pull-behind trailer.  I wondered about it, then realized it was parked in my brother's driveway!  I did a quick U-turn, grabbed the donuts, and walked up to join in.  A few hours of paint and turpentine fumes later, check out the awesomeness they will be hauling across the country. 

We cleaned the paint off ourselves as best as we could (fingernail beds are apparently a permanent paint location) and had tasty sushi for dinner.  I've never been so full from sushi before that I thought I might burst.  Well, there were bento box goodies and ice cream too.  Mmm...mango, red bean, ginger, green tea, mochi...why do Americans only believe in chocolate and more chocolate?  Thankfully the filling dinner saved the donuts so we were able to slice them up into little wedges and enjoy them with our otherwise healthy breakfast of eggs, turkey bacon, turkey sausage, and oatmeal-applesauce pancakes.  Sure, they roll out the healthy goodness, and my contributions are donuts and mimosas.

It was a fun drive up to MDSW, until the last couple miles that added nearly an hour onto our travel time.  Gads they needed a cop at the intersection!  Once we got near enough we all piled out of the van and started walking to the festival rather than sit in traffic anymore (Thanks Daven!).  Ever had a dandelion fight?  It's really fun, although hard to attack someone if you have to run up to catch them.  Here we are at the climax of our battle - I wish the camera captured the cloud of dandelion fluff we're standing in.  I also learned a dandelion in the ear is shriek-worthy no matter who the victim is. 

I haven't been to MDSW in 8 years or so.  It was great, but less overwhelming than it felt back in those days.  I think I've learned so much in the intervening years I don't need to see/touch/do everything (oops, I mistyped 'everyone' at first).  I did learn a few things that are handy. 
1. Kilts are great as they totally replace a shoulder bag or purse and leave your hands completely free.  I wasn't sure about it at first (my brother handed out kilts left and right when we were all leaving that morning) but by the end of the day I was glad to have it.  Seriously, I had my wallet, camera, phone, notepad, pen, and snack in my pockets and then clipped all my purchases into the convenient belt clip.  There were quite a lot of kilt wearers there that day, which brought questions from some confused folks who thought we were in a dance troupe or something.
2. Golding Ring Spindles really do spin longer than any other, and are totally gorgeous.  But after using them I lost my decade-old desire to have one.  All the extra spin time is meaningless since you have to stop once you near the ground.  And the shafts are kind of tacky feeling.  It might have been because of the heat melting the wood wax, but they had a feel reminiscent of the Mongolian Grill wooden platters you put your bowl on.  It's kind of like losing a crush.

Oh, you'd rather see the haul of stuff I bought?  Special thanks to my husband for demanding that I buy whatever I wanted.  Here's the pretty yarns:

Top: Mountain Colors sock yarn.
Left to Right: Zauberball laceweight, 2 balls of Mini Mochi for alternate colorway striping, 2 skeins of Claudia's Handpaint for striped socks, maybe the Jaywalker Pattern.
I didn't photograph the blue faced leicester wools, since a camera can't capture the feel of them.  I also got a supremely awesome pendant I'll post later.

We stayed to the end of the festival and by that point were trudging along after a day of dizzingly hot weather.  I knew how hot it was when I realized I'd drank 3 quart-sized lemonades and a bottle of water and never had to pee.  Here's part of our band heading out.

I'm so glad I got to go with such a fun group of people.  Maybe we can all meet at Estes one year...

Embarking on a new hobby!

Well, not entirely new. I've done weaving before. But never Tapestry weaving! And it IS another yarn-associated craft, so not like delving into woodturning or something. And it fits my rule of not being too bulky or expensive -- I have to make up rules like this or my house would be overrun by insane craft experiments. Don't tell my husband I said that, he already thinks that's true and I'd hate to see what he thought if he knew how much worse it could be.

So I was at my friend's house, in her awesomely envy-inspiring workshop that brings to mind a classic wood cabin complete with wee Franklin stove and a loft. She had her current tapestry on the loom and we started talking about how to build one myself. I dashed to the hardware store for the necessary supplies and she helped me build my very own copper pipe loom. I've been playing with ideas, drawing pictures, and imagining what I'd like to weave. I saw the local yarn shop was having a sale on tapestry yarn, and made a spur of the moment decision while driving there on what I would weave. Here's the yarns I bought.
The colors aren't as saturated in real life as this photo. That garish stripe of farm-raised egg yolk yellow isn't nearly so bad, and the greens are closer to grasses than rainforests like the photo suggests. So I have my yarn, my loom, my warp, my ideas. Now I just need to draw the picture so I know what and where I'm doing things. Keepin my fingers crossed, hope it all goes well!

Garden Party!

Our garden is in full swing. I love going out early on Sat. mornings and trying to see how much we can get done before it gets too hot. No matter what we do that day, at the end of it we always look out over the garden and comment proudly how much better it looks now. We always seem to say it with a touch of wonder, like we didn't really expect a few hours of work to make such a difference. This is as much as I could fit in one photo frame, but it extends off to left more. The trees in the background are all different varieties of apple trees - great for well-rounded pies & sauces.The funny thing is, it's not my backyard! This at my friend's house. A few years ago I wished aloud about having a garden, and she said her's was bigger than she could easily do by herself. So we joined forces and have had a great time gardening together. This year a mutual friend joined us, and we all have fun working together. Our styles of gardening complement each other well, and we seem to all hit the "it's hot and I'm tired" point at the exact same time.

Doesn't the garden look nice? All the lush plants and promises of future harvest. Ironically, our very best-looking plant is our compostatoes. They rooted from some old potatoes we tossed in the compost pile and are doing so well we agreed not to turn the compost pile so the potatoes can keep growing. It's fun, more like a science experiment than gardening. No idea what variety of potato it is (I'm hoping garnet sweet potato!). It's heartening in a way to know our compost pile is doing well enough to support potato plants. Since it's open-air I always wonder if the veggie scraps are really turning into compost, or is it just a buffet for the local wildlife? The chipmunks are certainly out in force already. They love our strawberries, and we all got to sample the nearly ripe berries yesterday because the few red ones we saw had chipmunk bites taken out of them. They were warm from the sun, and a mouth-watering mix of future sweetness and not-quite-ripe tartness. If it's anything like last year we are going to have more strawberries than we can conceivably use, even split 3 ways.

It's showtime Synergy!

I hope the reference wasn't too esoteric. Just rub your star sparkle earrings and get ready to kick some Misfits ass. So yet another example of the weird synergistic connection my SIL and I share. We seem to have an oddly similar approach to things, down to having matching nailpolish. Here we are at xmas (my feet, her hands): Totally convergent evolution, never have we discussed these things. All of you who know me know that I always wear blue toenail polish. I may stray a bit and wear teal, but that's as far as it goes. So one day I got a wild hair up my ass and painted my toenails ruby red. I was stunned when I next saw my SIL and her nails were the exact same color as mine. Ok, this isn't like twins separated at birth who end up living identical lives on opposite coasts. But it does feel a bit more than just coincidence. Hey, you can see my rainbow sock knitting in the corner! Sorry, got a bit of the "ooh shiny!" distraction going on.

No catchy title, just good fun

My sister-in-law just came for a visit (well, my brother was there too, but she & I went off on our own). We had a delightful time starting at the local wine shop for their weekly tasting and buying some rare & unusual wines with my brother. He met up with an old friend there and we went our separate ways. Our next stop was to the local donut shop (a request from my bro) to pick up some stunningly fabulous donuts. Not even sure how to accurately describe how wonderful they are - small batch, freshly made, soft inside with a crisp tooth on the outside, worth breaking any diet for.

Then on to the local yarn store, where we sat on the floor pulling together colors for our next 2-row projects. We unconsciously were holding the potential yarn balls the same way, and laughed when we saw the result. I think she got the one on her thumb in the end. I found a perfect colorway combination, but the yarn was just a bit crispier than I'd like so I talked myself out of it in the end. The women are not very welcoming at this shop, so we left and went next door to Starbucks (stopping by the car to pick up a donut) to knit and chat. I think we spent a couple hours there. The conversation was great and it was neat that we were working on essentially the same project in different colorways-you can see my scarf below. When are they going to invent teleporters so we can get together on a regular basis for craft-chatting?We got the crazy idea to go back home and dye some self-striping yarn ourselves, since I didn't get any at the shop. I do this regularly so it's not that crazy, just the spontenaity (good god that doesn't look spelled right) that made it seem so. We haul out my warped warping board and begin winding the yarn to prep for dyeing. She was an extremely helpful assistant during the winding process. After we finished we talked about what colors we wanted, and neither of us were definite about anything. So we bundled it all away for future use and went out to dinner with the guys. We already have too many plans for the next time we see each other (in a few weeks!).

A blogger's conundrum

Do I talk about fiber and yarn too much on this blog? I sometimes feel like I do, and my non-fibery readers get bored. But when I look back over prior posts, there are a lot that have nothing to do with knitting, so maybe it's my own self-consciousness. Also a problem is that most of the other blogs I read are truly fiber geek blogs, so you feel this pressure to write about your own fiber adventures, and I just can't get *that* into Ravelry, regardless of how many times I try.

No, the truth is that I carry knitting with me almost anywhere I go, and that even something like my obsessed watching of this insane new series on Starz called Crash involves fiber. I was visiting a friend to do some handspinning (both of our wheels were dusty with disuse), and she played the first episode of this series. I was instantly hooked, and went back a few days later for a Crash & handspinning mini-marathon (I don't have starz). This series involves a number of seemingly unrelated story lines - Dennis Hopper is great as an off-the-wall producer - and there's something about it that makes you have to keep watching. Thankfully there's less gratuitous sex than in an HBO series. Hey, I'm all for sex scenes in a show, but HBO tosses one in anytime they have a hiccup in the plot, rather than using them when it's part of the story. Handspinning is perfect for watching this because you don't have to look at your hands and can keep your eyes glues to the insanity unfolding in front of you.

Well, I guess overall I don't talk about knitting specifically all the time, but just like it flavors most events in my daily life, it certainly is going to flavor a blog about my life. Mmm...speaking of flavor I just caught a whiff of the potroast I'm making for dinner tonight. nom nom nom

Crafty Doppelganger

My awesome sister-in-law and I had a great time at our family xmas party. She's also a knitter and spinner, and we had a crazy time drinking wine and fiber geeking. We have a lot in common, to the point that when I saw her nailpolish I had to rip my sock off to show I had the exact same color on my toes.We also share a happily similar taste in knitting projects and yarns. The first time I met her she was knitting socks with kool-aid dyed yarn. I grinned and pulled out my own kool-aid socks project. It seems every time we visit it ends in pattern swaps for what the other person is knitting. She's also incredibly enthusiastic, moreso even than me if you can believe it. It rubs off when we're together, which is yet another reason I wish we lived closer together. I might actually get some projects finished with her encouragement.

For a good part of the evening we sat together on the couch knitting and talking. I told her to knit on my 2-row Noro scarf (no it's not Noro yarn) a bit - a touchy thing since most knitters have subtle variations in knitting styles. So now when I look at my scarf I can see the inch she knit, too subtle of a difference for anyone else to notice, but a happy reminder of the evening. Things got a bit silly later in the evening, including some dangerous online shopping, and hilarity over my inability to match dye lots. Hey! When you dye your own yarn without measuring these things happen. Cool sock pattern, though. On a slightly unrelated note, I think yarn shops would be well served to hold wine tastings in the store. My local shop had a book signing party w/ wine one night and I think the owner made a killing off of tipsy yarn purchases. It's only extreme self control that keeps us all from going bonkers in yarn shops. A glass or 2 of wine destroys that, as my splurge on the current scarf yarn shows. She (and my brother) are coming for a visit in a couple weeks as a result of the online shopping that night. I can't wait to geek out with her again.

Finally, some cookie baking

About 3 years ago (must be that long ago, my hair was still too short to do anything with) my friend Jan & I got together to bake xmas cookies. We had a fantastic time, learned that 2 people adding ingredients to 1 recipe is a recipe for disaster, ended up with far too many cookies, and agreed to do it next year. Since then every time we plan to make cookies some crisis occurs that makes us cancel. Serious crises like detached retinas. But every year we make the plans. It's become a bit of a running joke. So we were a bit shocked and excited that we successfully got together to make cookies this year. Her son was home from college and agreed to help us. It was all going smoothly until we started cutting out the eggnog rollout cookies. There was a gingerbread man cutter and her son & I had a terrific time producing mangled and mutated cookies. Every dismemberment was accented with red sugar sprinkles. I remember doing the same type of thing as a kid, with the same reaction from the "mom" - quiet laughter and head shaking. Here's the final batch of freak men cooling. Can you find: Siamese twins, Tiny Tim, the one with Gangrene, the amputee, Antennapedia man (gotta love the drosophila genetics), the one with IBD, the vampire victim, The one who's boggling at the horror of it all, and the Frenchman? Brilliant!

Small towns are teh coolz

Living in a small town really has its advantages. This afternoon I was at a birthday party for a friend, and after listening to her grandkids perform a breathtaking strings & piano concert (Bach, Chopin, etc) I was looking around to see if I knew anyone. I was thrilled to unexpectedly spot a friend I used to dance with but haven't seen in almost 2 years. We had a great time catching up,
sharing what's changed and our future plans. Also admiring the new tattoos we've each gotten since we last saw each other. It was uplifting to hear her plans and goals for the future, the kind of things that just make you smile with happiness for the other person. All around today has been yet another great B'burg Saturday. The only downsides were that it was too hot (69°) to be wearing jeans out with the dogs, and Katie deciding to douse herself with "eau de poop" cologne on our trek. Ah well, at least they'll be clean after their baths. Yeah, that's a silver lining to justify a half hour bent over the bathtub scrubbing beasts. Guess I better get crackin'