Wednesday, June 25, 2008

I love my loom

Hi! Here's my little loom. It's a 16 inch Ashford rigid heddle loom. In this picture is my first project, a wool scarf for DH. The warp is gray millspun yarn, pretty thin, given to me years ago, made from local wool. The weft is my handspun, the same yarn as my Sugar on Snow is knitted from, spun from the Blueberry roving I got with the gift cert. from you! I gave the scarf to DH for his birthday. The loom is easy to warp and use. I bought it and several books with the money from selling my standard gauge knitting machine earlier this year. I got the loom slightly used on ebay. I picked a 16" because I pictured mostly small projects or ones that can be seamed and because it seemed like it would be an easy reach across. I'm back to strawberry freezing, designing, and other summer fun now, ciao, Cindy

Friday, June 20, 2008

117, or is it 151?

Hi Cindy!

Welcome to this side of summer!
Hope you're staying comfortable. We, most definitely, are not. We've had a full week of "Extreme Heat" warnings and are likely to keep it up for a few more days. It felt extra hot yesterday when I walked out to the car at the end of the day. I was sure it had broken the record of 115. And on the way home the thermometer on the car said 117 so I was sure we'd broken the record. But no, the official temperature at the airport was only 112 for the day. We swam in the pool the other night at 9:30 and it was still warm out. The moon was full and it was a lot of fun although there was a slight breeze that made the skin cool when you got out.
Well, according to Blogger this should be Post #151. Hard to believe we've put out that many posts in just over a year. We have slowed down quite a bit in the last few months but we're still writing so that's a good thing.
As a close, here is an amazing picture of a male hummingbird sitting on the next. My friend Matt helps his wife out with field work on the weekends. She is working on a PhD in ecology and is mostly studying bats. While they were out last weekend they came across this little guy sitting on the nest. He let them take a few pictures of him and then flew around a little to also let them see the eggs below.
Well, I'd better close this up. I'm planning on writing about last week's WWKIP Day activity that I went to in Jerome. Check out Tempe Yarn for pictures from their Virtual KIP Event. I'm there.
Take care, A

Thursday, June 5, 2008

Happy Blogiversary!

Hi Cindy!

Hard to believe it's been a year, and 148 previous posts, since we started our little conversation. It's been a lot of fun and good practice on writing, at least writing something other than memos for work. I've become more comfortable and accomplished with my knitting and have begun to design a few fledgling projects. I started spinning and, although I need much more practice, it is coming along nicely. In the next year I hope to have our Project flying along nicely and I may even muster the courage to start some colorwork, especially for some of the items for the Project. I recently taught one of my friends at work how to knit and she's threatening to teach me how to crochet. I'm not sure I'm up to that.

It's been long enough since I've posted that this is going to be a multi-themed post. Next topic, a picture of baby Jahmia. I had lunch a couple of weeks ago with Julie and Lytifa and she brought both girls along. Julie hadn't yet met Jahmia and we both got plenty of baby time.
She is just about 11 weeks old in the picture and is turning into quite the little chunk. She's a real sweety and her older sister is crazy for her.

Last week we went over to Hollywood again for a concert, REM this time. The National and Modest Mouse opened up. The whole show was really good and REM was awesome! No pictures of the show, they didn't allow the carry-ins like they did last year for the Decemberists show. We stayed just down the street again so we were able to walk to the show and not have to worry about parking. The next morning we walked around Hollywood a bit, looking for a diner to have breakfast at. We ended up a Mel's Drive-In on Highland, just south of Hollywood Blvd. It was pretty good.

Afterwards we drove up Mullholland Drive and then down Coldwater Canyon into Beverly Hills. The picture below is looking north into the San Fernando Valley. The MGM studio that burned on Sunday is probably somewhere over my left shoulder.
In Beverly Hills we turned back west and head out Sunset Blvd towards Pacific Palisades and then on down to the beach. We walked on the Will Rogers State Beach for a while and watched the waves crash. It was really relaxing but a bit cool. We weren't prepared for the beach either.
The little guy below kept heading for our feet. I think he was trying to hide from the gulls that were hanging out on the beach and looking for a bite to eat.

From there we headed a little south on Highway 1 and then up into Santa Monica. It is really pretty but the traffic was typical LA. We took Santa Monica Blvd east until we hit Wilshire, right near Rodeo Drive. The traffic was pretty heavy for a mile or two until we got out of Beverly Hills (again). Next stop, the La Brea Tar Pits. They are a series of tar seeps. The biggest one, shown below, was mined as a natural asphalt seep in the late 1800's. It has since filled up with skunky water. Every minute or so bubbles of gas, some times quite big, break through to the surface. The whole area smells like diesel. In the upper right corner of the picture you can see the Page Natural History Museum where they've collected and exhibit all the animal fossils that have oozed from the tar. We didn't actually go in the building. We walked around a little and then went into the LA County Museum of Art right next door. It is quite a big museum. We spent about 4 hours there and still didn't see it all. We're definitely headed back.

One final picture of a resin giant sloth on the north side of the property. I had to take the picture for Stu at work. He was "mauled" by a sloth a few years ago while helping to vaccinate it. He was relieved it wasn't this big. Okay, it's late and time for bed. More knitting content, hopefully tomorrow.

Take Care, A

Monday, June 2, 2008

The merry month of May ??

Hi Alene, hope things are good in AZ. The month of May was not so merry here. It took me about 3 weeks to feel like myself after my "dependix" (as DD calls it) and by then, I was in the midst of a bad cold. Arrgh. Not so terrible in the scheme of the things but enough to throw the whole family off-stride. We hoped to be further on the garden, I hoped to have a bigger garage sale (we had a little one in mid-May as part of a whole neighborhood thing), and well, I'd hoped for a lot of things. Anyway, I'm glad for a new month because I am ready for a fresh start.

I did get a fair amount of reading and crafting done during my recovery and want to get pics of that up soon (I'm behind on figuring out my digital photos ;) Will be in touch soon about The Project as well (certainly not forgotten!!) Love, Cindy