Let me preface this by saying that the colors that I used to dye this were a deep acidy green, a greenish blue, and a deep blue. None of the colors you are about to see were involved to start with. Where they came from, I couldn’t even begin to guess.

Ready? Here ya go: Ugly Town. Don’t say you weren’t warned. ‘Cos ya were.

Speaking of ugly… oh, wait, no. These aren’t ugly. Cute as the dickens, those are. (wtf are dickens, anyway?) (don’t answer that).

The wee ones are growing! And getting ready to run for office, apparently, judging by the look on Tandoori’s face here…

And here we see that a)Kabob has grown more than the others, leading us to believe that it’s probably a boy, b)he/she/it doesn’t like standing on cardboard, and c)it has no fear of leaping off said cardboard into whatever lies beneath.

And here we have the totally crappy little movie of the chicken in the egg. It’s not the tiniest file, and it’s not the clearest thing, but you can, kinda, see the chicklet in the egg. Try right-clicking and saving it to your computer and giving it time to download….

That concludes your chicklet and ugly roving update for the evening. Tune in next time when we explore…. something else.

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In typical me fashion, I got a wild hair tonight and decided to jump right in to that dyeing-ones-own-roving thing. As a sys-admin, I really really really ought to have that whole RTFM thing down by now, but, well, yeah. It’s vastly more amusing to actualy *do* something than it is to *read about* something. So I busted out with the Wilton’s and the vinegar and I went to town.

Ugly Town, apparently.

If I can face the shame, I’ll post pictures at some point. Right now I’m in denial. It’s better that way.

On the chicken front - the babies are rapidly growing, and the eggs! Oh, the eggs! I candled the eggs again tonight, and one of them has a thin enough shell that I could see CHICKEN! Not just CHICKEN!, mind you, but MOVING CHICKEN. With heart beating. Pitter pat, pitter pat. Holy CRAP it was cool. Straight out of some Nova special, that was. If I could find the damn tripod and figure out a way to hold it all still and have the camera take a little video in the dark, I so would. All y’all need to see this.

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Yeah, yeah, I know. Chickens don’t have dick to do with knitting, but whatEVER. This is NEWS, baby!

CritterBoy and I have three full-grown chickens (Noodle, Sesame, and the silkie).
Noodle is the hen that crows, Sesame is just pretty and obnoxious, but
a good layer, and the silkie, at least right now, is doin’ nothin’ but
sittin’ on the next being broody as all hell.

Now, go back a
few months to last summer, when CB came home with the silkie and the
two others that we affectionately called “The Nuggets”, both of whom
were bobble-headed chickens - one a Buff Laced Polish, the other a Silver Polish. (Hey, wait, does this look familiar?). Sadly, both of the bobbles turned out to be roosters,
so they had to go. In this case they both went to my friend G at work.
The silver one died mysteriously about a week after going to his new
home, but the buff has grown and flourished and is gettin’ all kinds of
chicken-on-chicken action. So G has fertile eggs. Buff Laced
Polish/Auracana cross fertile eggs. But no broody hen. Sooo… you can
see where this is going, can’t you?

Last week G brought me three eggs. I put them under the silkie, just to see what would happen. She, of course, has been savagely sitting on them, dutifully turning them, and being all kinds of excited about being allowed to sit on them. I candled the three eggs last night, and one of them I’m pretty sure isn’t doing anything. One I can’t quite tell, but I think it might be incubating, and the third one? Oh yeah, TOTALLY growing a chicken in there. Hoo-ee! Two weeks from tomorrow we should have another chicklet! If I could figure out how to take pictures of the developing chicklet I would totally do it, so stay tuned and I’ll see if I can’t figure that one out.

This concludes your chicken update for today. No knitting or spinning has really happened that’s worth talking about. I will, however, take some pix of the chicklets tonight when I get home - two days and they’re visibly bigger! Hooray for frighteningly rapid growth!

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Ok! Ok! I finally did it. Found the battery charger for the camera and charged up the battery. And now we have pictures. Several of them. Yay. Woo. Nope, sorry, can’t muster any more excitement today. Lame, but whatterya gonna do?

So. I really have been productive, I just haven’t done much in the way of talkin’ about it or takin’ pix of it. But, I’ve got pictures now, so here goes, in no particular order:

The cabled sweater I did for Denise’s new baby Owen:

and a close up of the same:

Today’s chickens brought to you by CritterBoy and the letter L:

Here they are in the bag they came home from the feed store in.
And here they are individually:




And here they are all together in their temporary home (until they’re big enough to go outside)

They will be some varieties of bantam whence they’ve growed they’selves all up. We’re hoping for more bobble-headed ones, but we’ll just have to wait and see. None of these three have names yet, so please, leave suggestions! The names we’ve already gone through with the others: General Tso, Lemon, Noodle, Sesame, Garlic, and The Nuggets (a matching set of bobble heads that weren’t with us long since they both turned out to be boys and we live in the city). We also have a Silkie whom, for whatever reason, has never been named. She’s just “the silkie”.

Here we have the Lorna’s Laces roving that Penny got me from Threadbear for xmas:

And here is a chunk of it all predrafted (it’s wonderful to spin, but doesn’t draft easily)

Here it is partially spun up on the Joy

And the first skein, navajo plied:

The Interlacements silk roving that I got at Woodland Woolworks when I was down in Oregon a couple weeks ago all spun up:

My first go at intarsia-in-the-round. Front, then back:

And finally, the front of our friend Squagel’s car when he was foolish enough to leave it with The Boy for three weeks while he was off enjoying New Zealand. This will probably only be funny to the geek/gamer contingent among you:

For the rest of the pics of his car, all stickered up, you can go here. The carebears are an Eve reference…

There you have it. The update. In pictures.

Comments Off | In: General, knit-o-rama | | #

Damn. It’s been a solid month since I bothered to update. That, my friends, is suckful, and I apologize. Yes indeed.

In the past month I have actually accomplished several things, including finishing some of the UFO’s, and finishing a couple of new projects. (The best one had to be the two-days-two-socks project from Peace Fleece). I’ll have pictures of all of it in the next few days - I just have to find the battery charger for the new camera…

Last night I learned not one but TWO new things! (well, three, actually). I learned how to spin silk last night, which was vastly easier than I had imagined it was going to be, and then I learned intarsia in the round, which was vastly more of a pain in the ass than I had imagined it was going to be. Funny how that works. And then I learned that I Must Have A Schacht Matchless. And a Majacraft Rose. I’ve got a line on the Schacht, but if you’ve got a Rose collecting dust, I’d be very interested in talkin’ to you about it. Drop me a line about it, wontcha? Great. Thanks.

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