Done!

Done with the Olympics: I'm always a bit wistful at the end of the Winter Games because I enjoy them so much and always want to watch more than I can.

Done with Ravelympics: Whew, I'm relieved that I finished my little spinning and dyeing projects. I wasn't sure I'd make it, but I did and had a lot of fun being part of Ravelympics 2010. Maybe I'll be brave and try a slighter larger project next time.

Done with February: It was better than January, thanks to DS's birthday and the Olympics. Onward to the transitional month of March! Longer days, new projects, contemplation of gardening . . . all good.

Hope March brings you good things too!

Crafty progress

Greetings from August in Wisconsin! It's the time of garden delights, visits to our great city pool, assorted get-ready-for-school plans and anxieties, and reflection on the speed of summer. Thanks so much for the birthday package!! The kids loved the toys and I am head over heels for the lovely alpaca fiber! The top pictures are a recycling WIP; that's a 100% cotton thrift store sweater that was not serged together, price $4.99. It has huge sleeves and is a baggy style. I'm unraveling it and expect enough yarn for a vest or short sleeve cardigan for me.

The other two pictures show what I'm doing with my fleece: a bag to felt. The colored bits are from other sources but the natural color is form the Jacob fleece. The spinning has been great, and I liked the fiber prep pretty well too. If I get a fleece again next year, I'm going to get it prepared at a mill because the prep does take a lot of time and I'm not getting as consistent results as I'd like. The felting will hide my inconsistencies and give me something I can use year-round. I haven't decided if I will get another fleece or if I will join a local fiber CSA (yup, found one!) or just buy from one of our great local fiber sources.

Hope all is well in AZ! Love, Cindy

Happy Birthday Harry Potter!

And JKR also, who I see in the paper this morning is 44. A good age, don't you think? Even though I have to wait 8 days to find out . . .

Here's a picture from about 2 weeks ago of the family with our 2009 cherry harvest! I haven't done the promised spinning & knitting post yet but have been staying out of trouble with domestic duties, seeing the HP6 movie with DH (we l0ved it), following the Tour in the newspaper, going to the geology museum's quarry fossil hunt, babysitting neighbors' pets, and the like. Only 1 month until school starts and I am both very keen for it and sad to see the summer race by. How did you do on the Tour de Fleece?? Was it fun? I'm thinking we maybe should form a team some year. More soon, love, Cindy, almost 44

Summer update, part 2

Hi! Here's most of the handspun I've made so far this summer. The blue and purple are from a roving I got at the Sow's Ear. The greens are from samples out of the April Phat Fiber box. The grays, browns, and natural "whites" are from that lovely Jacob fleece.

I dithered a lot about what to make from my fleece. At first, I wanted a Kaffe Fassett vest but kept thinking that a multi-colored vest would be pretty hot to wear . . . not a bad thing in Wisconsin but toasty enough to limit its wearing to winter only. So I've opted to make a groovy Satchel instead. I'm going to knit a Kaffe multi-color pattern on the big blank space on the outside. This also has 2 great advantages: I can carry it with me everywhere I go year-round ;) and it hides the (ahem) many irregularities in my spinning from my learning to card and spin long draw.

We've been busy with the garden (doing amazing despite a cool dryish summer) and assorted family activities like going to the County Fair. Hope all is well there. How goes the TdF?? Love, Cindy

Summer update, part 1

Hi Alene! Here's some of what I've been up to this summer. No, I'm not playing poker; those & the jar are for a Hogwarts-style points system for the kids. That's a raspberry dessert (yum!). I'll get together my spinning for a photo op as soon as a few skeins are dry. Hope your Tour is going well. May the Fleece be with you until my next posting, Cindy

p.s. I LOVE your Team's Oz-themed ravatar.

Out of control plying

Hi! I really like November. I still love watching snow showers; it's quite pretty. True sweater weather with no need to rush to the shoveling :D

I got a bit of spinning done. I separated out the blue-green part of a Mountain Colors Targhee top and spun the singles from the fold on my wheel. That was fun! Then I wanted to ply it but do a better job than I usually do. Last time I plied I tried a DIY tensioned lazy kate and thought it worked great (cheap too!!). I didn't have quite the right size of basket available, so this time I wound it off on my nostepinne, stuck a size 15 straight knitting needle through the middle of the ball to help me keep the center under control, and plied from both ends of the ball with my largest drop spindle. It came out nicely and mostly under control! I'm going to find a proper size basket for the DIY kate and change my plying ways.

I finally put up a pic of DH's slipper socks on Ravelry. I wasn't really settling on a Shawl Ministry project but now think I'll do a throw but in strips, so I can carry it around easily and not worry about running out of yarn. Later, love, Cindy

A Knifty project

Hi Alene, how's it going? Here's a little scarf I made for the charity projects my LYS is collecting. I used a Knifty Knitter which is very similar to a gadget we had when I was a kid that I remember making scarves on. I still find it relaxing to wind the yarn around the pegs :) It's neat how many different ways there are to make knitting.

My congregation has started a shawl ministry to make comfort items for members who are in need. There is no production pressure, just opportunities for mindfulness, fellowship, and connection. I'm keen to participate.

Fall is here in earnest despite the hot & cold flipping of the weather. The colors are gorgeous. We had our first frost about 10 days ago. Have the temps in AZ mellowed yet? Ciao, Cindy

It must be fall

Signs of fall recently observed here:

*DD was flower girl to her oldest cousin (and godmother) on the first Saturday in September
*a squirrel tried to use our clothes reel as a tree (note the large green nut it is carrying)
*I got out my thick robe
*teeth are falling slowly, as are leaves
*the urge to spin cotton has been replaced by the urge to make felted wooly things
*I've been experimenting with making homemade bread
*large quanities of lovely wool have been pouring into the shop!!

I love this season! More soon, love, Cindy

A little of everything

Hi Alene! Hope all is well in sunny AZ. It's raining today but the raspberries appreciate it. Third day of school already; the summer didn't seem too long. We had a great one despite the rough start of extreme rain and my appendectomy this spring. There's never enough time to do all the things we imagine, but we did a good number of them and had lots of fun together. The weather gave us a break by being cooler and less humid than typical, so that made a pleasant change. Because of the coolness and our late start to the garden, we still have tomatoes coming, so soon DH will be making salsa!

Still working here & there on the clear-out I started in January; things are looking better around here. Also thinking a lot about spinning and knitting and trying felting again (have had mixed results in the past). Have you seen this cool magazine from Interweave? I want to knit & felt some mittens (and maybe needle felt some sort of embellishment and maybe try some wet felting just cuz it looks amazing. The birthday book you sent is one I know I'll keep rereading.

Time to get going on our school morning routine, more soon, love, C

Earth Day

Hi again, hope AZ is giving you a good spring. Here are a few pics from earlier this month (notice the snow piles lingering in the background:) . Earth Day continues to grow in meaning for me through the years. Starting when I was in grad school, I use the day to reflect on my commitment to our planet and what I can do better at. Seeing An Inconvenient Truth last year really focused my attention again and I'm really glad about that. I'm still committed to using up my stash, but the big thing for me this year (although not craft related) is to take shorter showers. If I can figure out other ways we can use less water, I'm going to try them.

I hear a sneeze upstairs so it's on to our before-school routine. Still keeping you & yours in my thoughts, love, Cindy, earth muffin

March pictures during April showers

Hi Alene, what a difference a few weeks makes. [oops, weird formatting again] These pictures are from March and are in order :) DH's vest came out great and is a good and warm just the way it is. He opted to have me skip the "timbers" that were a big part of the original design (sorry, Philosopher's Wool) so now I have a bunch of skeins of black yarn to make something else! Darn;)

I'll be trying to catch up on my blogging too after some slacking due to getting some lessons ready for RE, having lots happening at home, school, & work, and the start of soccer, farmer's markets, and gardening! Yay! All good things except the water in one part of the basement; yes, now we are having lots of rain and need a new gutter on the front of the house.

I've been keeping your family in my thoughts and hope your dad is doing OK. I'm thinking ahead to Earth Day, so "see" you then. Love, Cindy

Of Ravelry, moola, and spring

Sorry for my pictureless state, Alene; it's been one of those (several) weeks. Lots new here. Around the house: furnace, cooktop, home equity loan. Teaching: knitting classes, volcano talk at 1st grade (it was fun, challenging, not sure I didn't bore them, and quite sure I left several trains of thought derailed . . .), RE at the meeting house (there I'm one of 4 teachers for DS's class).

Crafting is going well since there's no way to do gardening prep outside. I can't believe there's still going to be snow on the ground for spring break! It's next week. I love Ravelry. I've been flitting in and out of groups because there are SO many great ones. I've settled for now on not-too-high traffic ones I can keep up with and will actually read. I'm still doing the responsible stash thing. I sold one of my knitting machines after long contemplation. It is a great machine but I have barely used it since I started spinning. It used thinner yarns and I usually make medium to thick yarns, so I opted to stick with my Bond. I'm using the money to buy a small, slightly used rigid heddle loom and a bunch of books!

I hope to see you in April and would be thrilled if we could go to the Yarn Harlot's event together. If you want to stay over, we have a guest bed. I'll warn you it's near my wool . . . don't want all those "wool fumes" to make you want stash unbecoming to a desert-dweller. ;) Cindy

Dispatch from the winter that won't quit

But first, a picture of my birthday boy! Notice the lost tooth (first one, last month). He had a great day. Family party for both kids in March, still wavering (me, not him ;) about the friend party. And here's the cake: a chocolate eclair ring. Yum.

You probably heard we've broken our all-time record for most snow in one winter; we've already had over 80 inches and it is snowing again right now! Good thing I like winter. Good thing we had a bit of a thaw in January or it would be hard to find the front door . . . We all would have happily skipped the inch or so of freezing rain yesterday. Maybe the pic is too small: it's the ice on the clothes line (we were a bit optimistic in late November about hanging the wash out a few more times). We had no power for about 6 hours yesterday and had the dubious pleasure of shoveling water out of the garage. Who knew there was that low spot right under the garage door ?? After about the 3rd time of shoveling, the temp finally dropped enough that the snowbanks stopped melting and the rain mostly turned to snow which is better behaved!

Happily I got a lot of sewing up done on DH's vest; detailed post on that when it becomes a FO. Before that though, probably a post on our home improvement efforts for the year!

Also I'm trying to think up some new classes to teach at my LYS. Any suggestions? Love, C

Thanksgiving

Hope you had a grand Thanksgiving Day, Alene!

Here's what it looked like here. A bit of snow that fell Wednesday evening and is still on the ground. Good enough for playing in despite its meager amount! We had friends over (K the woman of honor from our wedding and her DH) and had a nice time. Even though DD was still a bit under the weather and DS had a burr under his saddle for some reason, most of the day was very nice and got me reflecting on the many things I have to be grateful for.

More soon on the status of Cactus Flower and future crafty things I'm contemplating, Love, Cindy

What have I been up to . . . and FO

Hi Alene! Despite the back & forth weather, we are in the thick of fall activities. Work, teaching knitting, teaching relig. ed., and crafting are going along well for me. Work, school, and lots of playing are going fine for the rest of the family. Crunchy leaves, plans for Halloween, tucking in what's left of the garden, and the end of our CSA season next in line.

As I mentioned somewhere above, I tried to sew some mittens out of a recycled sweater. It came out like a recycled sweater oven mitt and even that was hard to sew, due to the thickness of the fabric layers and my inexperience with this sort of sewing. So I got out some natural-colored bulky wool and knit DD a pair of mittens. Happily it doesn't take much time to make bulky mittens for a 3 year old. I updated my projects on our blog sidebar and am looking forward to some spinning! Cindy

Knitting Needle Knitting Bag

Hi Alene, I finished my bag this weekend! I wanted to make it from stash. My purply-not-solar-dyed yarn would be cute . . . but it was much thicker and there wasn't a lot of it. I ripped the first few rows several times until I got bigger needles and figured out an alternative to the p3tog (try that on sz. 15's, ugh). And where are the berries in berry stitch?? Duh, on the purl side! So I did use the purply, knitting both sides at once on 2 sets of needles until there was no more of that yarn, then switched to some orange with bits of purple I had leftover from a mitten sample. It worked great doubled. Then I used my pretty Peace Fleece needles at the top (I love them but don't use straight needles that often, so why not show them off this way?). The handles are Heilo doubled, knit on size 9's. I sewed it up at the Sow's Ear anniversary party & grand reopening; made a lining at home the next day. Just the right size for spindle spinning or a small knitting project. I am really happy with it.

We went to get pumpkins in weather more suited for sweet corn and tomatoes. Weird weather year. A front is supposed to come through today, dragging our fall weather behind it. I'm keen for sweaters! If you come in December, I hope to see you (and you might need a sweater too ;)
Cindy

WSWF, part 2

Dear Alene, hope you've had a good week. We have been slowly settling into the back to school groove with the distractions of harvest time: 1st frost last night, goodbye mosquitoes, 80's in a few days :o

Last Saturday I took a 6-hour class called Spinning For Mittens taught by Carol Rhoades (you may have seen her stuff in Spin-Off). It was a great class. My Louet (the solid disk of wood behind the orange chair at left) and I and about 11 other students covered a lot of interesting material. I was accustomed to spinning with a short backward draw almost always. Carol got us started on spinning woolen (with a long draw) and wow, was that fun. I need to practice of course, but that'll be fun too because she also taught us how to use handcards with a light touch to get lovely lofty rolags and lofty yarn too!

After lunch we briefly covered spinning worsted (most of us had previously been doing that) and then spent some time experimenting with different wools and fibers (camel, silk, etc.) to see which properties of a mitten we could achieve (softness, durability, etc). We also learned about spinning yarn of different thicknesses; all of this I can apply beyond mittens as you can see.

One thing I was delighted to discover was that my Louet has a bigger range of capability than I had anticipated. I could spin quite thin, my typical medium, and wonderfully thick by adjusting my spinning technique and my wheel. You can see some of Carol's example mittens and fingerless mitts at the top of the post. Hand warmers of all types will be good small projects to play with, since I love them anyway, and hats too. Someday perhaps (gulp) a whole sweater of handspun.

I had read online that Louet bobbins fit in Schacht's tensioned lazy kate and confirmed this on a classmate's equipment. More recently I saw in the plying article in the Fall knitty that there's a cheap way to make one myself and I think I have most of the parts already. This is good, more $ saved to spend later on fiber :D Have you seen the fall Knitty yet? What's your fave thing? Cindy

What a week!

Dear Alene, hope all is well. We had a good 1st week of school. Hints of autumn are here, and the festival was GREAT! Detailed posts on that soon. For today, here are after and before pics of a Pluckyfluff-inspired yarn I did before the festival, the squash patch that may eat my home, and the 1st tree near me to start turning (helped this year by the July drought). ciao, Cindy

WIPs, part 2

Hi Alene! Here are some more of my works in progress. First, a cream-colored sample cabled mitten; next to it of some orange tweed for a "plain" mitten and my top-down sweater in progress.

We continue to be very wet here. I hear this is the wettest month ever recorded in my fair city, over a foot of rain and more predicted! Gardening catch-up and school are the big topics here. Need to get back to the quilt next week once school starts. Here are some non-knitting WIPs
(DS and I tried out salt dough "clay"):


























Yum, tomato sauce. Your house looks great. Inspires me to got some painting going too! Ciao, Cindy

My smoky kitchen

Hi Alene! About 10-15 years ago, I decided I didn't want to become a weather curmudgeon as is easy to do in this climate. I've always loved fall but had gotten to complaining about spring (too mucky) and summer (too humid). I'd started noticing other people complaining a lot and thinking they were never happy about the weather. Gradually I saw some of that in myself and decided it was silly: no place was perfect and what a waste of my energy being unhappy about it. Once I looked for the good in each season, I was richly rewarded. I still find weather fascinating and love to talk about it but now I love the rhythm and events of the seasons even more. No wonder I embraced CSA and gardening and food preserving so much. When I saw the articles on solar dyeing in Knitty antd Spin-Off, I thought 'what a great way to celebrate the long northern days.'

After studying this article in Knitty, I decided to use up some of my leftover tie-dye on the Wensleydale I recently finished spinning. Since I got a late start that day, I figured a teapot of hot water was needed to get the dyepot going. So I put on the teakettle and headed downstairs to wind the yarn off my wheel and collect my other supplies (old canning kettle, dye, etc.). By the time I came back up with DS on my heels my kitchen was filled with smoke! I had turned on the wrong burner. Then there was several frantic and comic minutes while I took the very hot smoking dirty frying pan outside, we were serenaded by both smoke alarms, and the kids kept saying things like "it's hard to see across the living room" and I kept saying "there isn't any smoke downstairs, can't you play down there for a while??" I turned off the AC, opened windows, turned on every fan we have, and pretended it wasn't 95 degrees out. The irony that I would have been saving electricity by using solar heat if I hadn't tried to heat up the water an the stove and ended up running all sorts of fans and later needing the AC to run like crazy to catch up? Nope, not lost on me although it almost made me snicker as I was running around throwing windows open and apologizing to Farli for the chaos.

Eventually I got microwaved hot water in the pot in the sun, yarn & vinegar in and dye put on. The pic above shows that stage. It came out a pretty blue and purple but it must not have heated enough because the dye washed off a little as I started rinsing it the next day. So I put it on the stove top and overdyed it purple (still from the tie-dye leftovers).

I decided that I am definitely going to try solar dyeing again but with a homemade reflector (cardboard & foil) and maybe around the summer solstice when I have the longest hours of daylight.


I bet with your sunshine you could do it almost any time of year! Cindy