And hilarity ensued

Posted on February 21, 2013 by admin

Spinning camp, day 3

I kicked some long draw ass today, kids. That was super exciting, since I’ve never, ever been able to do long draw even a tiny bit.

More deer! Even less afraid of humans than yesterday’s deer were! (seriously – I was about 2 feet away from this one when I took this picture)

Finished spinning the silk, and plied it with the alpaca/merino/silk. That turned out quite nicely. Fascinating thing there – Judith had given us these two fibers and some suggestions on how to spin them. One idea was to hold the two together and spin them just held that way, so you’d get a bit of one, a bit of the other, back and forth in the singles. Another was to spin them separately and ply them together. Tina and I decided to test both and see how different they were. She did the first option, I did the second, with the singles being roughly the same thickness. The two plied yarns are SO different. We are different spinners, yes, but the two different preparations resulted in surprisingly different yarns. I want to knit with mine and weave with Tina’s.

The two spun separately (both spun worsted) and plied together is lofty and fuzzy, the two held together is glossy and denser and darker in color. They’re both really lovely, but completely different. Compare and contrast:

I made a new friend:

And there was some really strange things happening at the other end of the room. There was fiber wrapped up around their heads, too, while they were trying to untangle whatever was going on there.

The best moment of the day, though, was Tina’s daughter responding to a text querying how her day was with:

“Fine
Learned some shit.
Fucked some bitches. Made some money.”

Yeah. I love these people.

Spinning camp, days 1 and 2

Posted on February 20, 2013 by admin

Seriously. Spinning camp. At Camp Orkila, no less – the camp I managed to completely avoid my entire childhood, and now I’m here for a week as a full-fledged grownup. Hilarious.

Monday: Up since 4:30am, spun 4 (miserable) ounces of merino/tussah that I got at… Sock Summit? Probably. It was so pretty in the braid, and was, sadly, a bit felted, incredibly sticky, didn’t want to draft for ANYTHING, and spun up into 120ish yards of 3-ply sport-dk weight nastiness. Yuck.

Boggled at the deer. They are ridiculously unafraid of humans, and you can walk almost up to them before they give you a nasty look and amble a few feet farther away. Also: humans are not the only ones who make stupid faces when being photographed.

Amused at the distribution of spinning wheels present. There are 18 people, and the only wheels here are Jensens, Lendrums, Hansens, and pocket wheels (there are actually two others, a Majacraft and a big production wheel of unknown manufacture, but I’m not counting those).

Tuesday: Learned all kinds of cool stuff from Judith, spun some extremely satisfactory (and skinny!) stuff, and walked on the beach.

The rest of the day, in pictures:

The beach, looking at Canada, where my cell phone thinks I am

If Judith had spun this, this would be two plies instead of the one. She did dye it, though.

The first half ounce or so of the polworth/silk mix from above, on my wheel.

The pretty little wheel to my right.

The rest of the pictures from camp are here if you’re jonesing to see.

The Craft Pit is All Grown Up

Posted on August 14, 2012 by admin

Welcome to the new studio space!

There’s still a bit of work yet to do, but it’s done enough to start moving into at this point. We have to figure out how to shingle and trim around the new door, and need to get our wonderful window guy back out to do the window trim, put in baseboards, move the ends of the light fixtures to better distribute the light, and get two more drawer units to put in the corner near the ironing board. That seems like a lot of work, now that I’ve written it all out…

We’ve been working on this, off and on, for almost a year now. No, I didn’t take any before pictures. The before on this was too awful to contemplate, let alone photograph.
The building had had an electrical fire at some point, after which the owners had mostly gutted it, and then used it to store several decades worth of random crap, all of which the previous owners just left out there. After several trips to the dump to get rid of all the crap, and a lot of screaming and flailing every time one of the enormous shed spiders was encountered, we finally got it cleaned out enough to use it for storing our own random crap.

A new roof here, some electrical work there, and a considerable amount of standing around wondering WTF (seriously – WHY remove whatever passed for plumbing out there by cutting the pipes off, at an angle, just above the foundation wall? WHY????), and we finally got to start the fun of hanging drywall. The drywall took forever, during which time we discovered that there were no studs out there that were the same distance apart. A few were 16″ apart, but the rest were anywhere between 11″ and 33″. And none of the walls are square or straight. Good times!

I’ve got about half of the stuff moved out there and set up so far. Still have lots and lots of bins to unpack and make sense of, but it finally feels more like studio instead of shed. Hopefully it’ll be done enough to get some drafting and sewing done next weekend. Hopefully.

Looking from the corner nook into the room towards the drafting table and the sewing table (the serger is there, but the sewing machine hasn’t been moved out yet):

Looking from the far corner behind the sewing table towards the nook. All of those bins are still yet to be unpacked or repacked and put on the tall chrome shelving that’s still in the basement:

Standing in the doorway looking in towards the sewing table end of the room. The books are about the only things that are likely to stay right where they are. The class sweaters will probably go back in the house, and the fabric will get moved around, the swatch bins will move, etc, etc:

In other news… Nope. No other news. Nothing at all to report other than this. It’s been fairly all-consuming, really.

Baa Baa Black Sheep

Posted on June 24, 2007 by admin

Well, another BSG is over (well, over for us at any rate, it still goes all day tomorrow, but we’ll be on the road headed to Belmont Station in Portland to get some tasty beer and then home to the north lands to sit on the deck and drink the tasty beer).

This year, like last year, was a hell of a lot of fun with much merrymaking with people we just don’t get to see often enough (waving madly in the direction of Sheila and Michael, Tina and gang, Barb, Jen, Jessica, Peggy and Rebecca, and Natasha, and I know I’m missing some), and meeting people in person whom we’ve only known through the internets (hullo Joanne and Laura and Tammy!)

Much fun, entirely too much food, a ginormous rental car full of fiber (‘The Behemoth’), and NO FLEECE. Woo! Go us with our uncanny restraint. We’ll thank ourselves later.

More pix in the gallery.

Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together?

Posted on September 17, 2006 by admin

Especially when you put absolutely NO effort into it? Ooooh yeah.

So, back in… February? At Madrona, I saw this hank of Dicentra targhee that for whatever reason I couldn’t resist. It made no sense at the time. NONE. It was ORANGE! and MAGENTA!, two colors which, honestly, I CAN’T STAND. But I couldn’t walk away from it. It exerted some sort of freaky fiber-power over me, and I had to buy it. The look on Angela’s face spoke volumes, since she knows the colors I like and these? Not on that list. Anywhere.

It took me a while to spin it up, but the Reeves 19″ saxony did a lovely job with it, and I ended up plying it from a center pull ball, and it came out soooo beautifully. And it has languished on top of the basket o’ fiber ever since.

I saw it sitting up there the other night and thought ooh! that would make a lovely panta! So I pulled it down, and got out some needles, and waffled for a bit between making a panta or seeing if I could get a pair of fingerless mitts out of it. I opted, finally, for the panta.

Not only is the panta SOO perfect – it starts orange, and fades gently to MAGENTA at the center, and then, amazingly, PERFECTLY back to orange! Like I planned it that way. And on top of that little bit of joy? I found another skein of it, having totally forgotten that I ended up with two skeins, so I still have plenty for a pair of fingerless mitts! Hooray!

Musta been meant to be…
(batteries are dead, pics to follow)

EDIT: For those that don’t know, a panta is a headband. The pattern that I used was the translation from Crafster, but I think this one might be a better version of it.

Yum, Ow, and BWAH!

Posted on September 4, 2006 by admin

No, these are not the photos you were looking for.

But oooh! Yummy handpainted sock yarn goodness, courtesy of Kirsten at Through The Loops (and I know you’re jealous of my consistently crap photography skills and inability to get any kind of lighting to ever work FOR me…):

And (no laughing, Lara), a genuine quilting injury (caught my arm on a pin while reaching across it, and rrrriiiiiiiiippppppppppp went the skin. Woot! And who knew it was that difficult to take a picture of your own forearm? Not I, certainly):

HA! Pictures! And you thought I’d never do it…

Posted on August 21, 2006 by admin

So.. Yeah. Look at me go with the finding of the camera and the charging of the battery and the taking of pictures. Hoo-ee.

With no further ado then, photos:

The finished top of Lara’s quilt:

the finished top of Lara's quilt

The beginning of the Must Have Cardi sleeve for Melissa:
Must Have Cardi sleeve start

The O Ripple socks in STR in Fire on the Mountain:

And on the feet (those should have been my feet, mind you, but I cannot resist the pleading of the child):
O ripple socks on O's feet

And, finally, the SP8 reveal package I got from my Secret Pal Michelle (and look! she even wrapped it in beetle paper! See how perfect she is???):

And the OMG yummy baby alpaca lace weight hand dyed by her (three pics, so you can fully wallow in your jealousy):

Thank you again Michelle for being such a great Secret Pal!

BSG

Posted on June 26, 2006 by admin

I’ll see if I can’t do something about getting the critter pix up in the gallery later today, but in the mean time, two pics to whet your appetite:

The tiny bit of the OMG yummy merino fleece that Denise and I got (that staple length is 4-5″ (10-12.5cm or so):

and four samples of thigh-spun yarn that O made in the car on the way home:

Top to bottom: two ply, cabled, novelty three ply, and braided.

Too exhausted to think yet. Check back later for some stellar examples of my crap animal photography skillz.

Holy. Crap.

Posted on June 20, 2006 by admin

My Secret Pal loooooooves me, my Secret Pal loooooooves me, nyah nyah!

There were not one, but TWO boxes waiting for me when I got home today.
TWO! So lucky I am.

The first one was from my secret pal. Who, you must know, Kicks All Available Ass. Bigtime.
Check it out (enclicken to embiggen – it deserves to be full size)

Everything in the box was individually wrapped, which made it that much more fun to open, and inside? OMG. Verklempt, people. That’s what I am.
Top package? An OUNCE of QIVIUT. I kid you not.
Then? Two ounces of gorgeous hand-dyed alpaca.
And a fuzzy sheep pez dispenser/key chain!
Then! Chocolate brown yak! That doesn’t smell like yak!
And? It doesn’t stop there – next up?
GUANACO A bag of guanaco!
Then coffee! And Chocolate! and a lavender & bergamot Badger bedtim bar that smells so good I just want to take a bite out of it.

I? Have the best secret pal EVER. Seriously. I am the luckiest girl in the world.

And then there was the second box, which was from one of the wonderful people on the FiberTraditions list who was destashing her sock yarn supply. Woo! Who could pass that up? And Jen says sock yarn isn’t stash enhancement, so it’s ok. She divvied her stash up into paper bags, and sent it out random-like. I got two bags worth, which turned out to be two skeins of Lorna’s Laces in Ember, and two skeins of Socka Color in browns with sparkles! Both should be great knit up, and were WAY too good a deal to pass up.

And one more pic for you, just to round out your day:
Our ever so balanced breakfast from Saturday with the TechniViking (who has put his pics from the rainforest trip up in the gallery):
Yes, that's strawberry shortcake and bacon

peace out

Oh, and a picture

Posted on May 13, 2006 by admin

Some alpaca I spun up two weekends ago (the all jammies all day weekend). The fiber was from Winderwood Farm (gorgeous colors, yo), and was gifted to me by the unbelievably talented Lara. I heart Lara.

More to come!

Blech.

Posted on February 28, 2006 by admin

Saturday I washed two Shetland fleeces. Yesterday I drum carded them both. Now? Everything smells and tastes like lanolin. Everything. My coffee? Wet sheep. Last night’s pizza and beer? Wet sheep. My shampoo this morning? OMFG, yeah, wet goddamned sheep. The only thing that doesn’t seem to smell like wet sheep? You guessed it. The rest of the wet fleece. Which smells like nothing. Nothing at all.

My nose is broken.

She’s growling over there

Posted on December 18, 2005 by admin

Xmas came early for the Booger. Last night to be specific, since she’s going skiing and we’ll be with Critterboy’s family. So, thanks to Angela and a wonderful woman she found on the Spinner’s and Weaver’s Housecleaning Pages, the Booger now has her very own spinning wheel. Check it out:

Spinning in front of the (very messy) book case

Concentrating awfully hard on the whole thing

Joy! Yarn!

Hooray for xmas! Go Booger with your fibery self!

Sock sock baby

Posted on October 26, 2005 by admin

As of 6:45pm last night, my life is all about the Sock!. Oh my heavens yes. It is. And shall continue to be until the Sock! is all gone. And then I’ll have to get some more. ‘Cos it’s Gooooooood. Mmmmmmm…. Sock!

Spin, span, spun

Posted on June 7, 2005 by admin

My level of surprise at the results of the spinning up of the fugly roving would elicit a “well coat me in butter and throw me into a French prison!” from our fabulous graphics guy Tony. Seriously.

You remember fugly, dontcha?

Ok, so I’m the Queen of Slack these days and haven’t bothered to take a picture of it spun up, but I really kind of like the way it turned out. I spun it a little thicker than I usually spin, so it’s about a… maybe heavy worsted weight? ish? and there isn’t all that much of it, but who woulda guessed? (yeah, yeah, a couple of you, I know)

I’ll get pics of it up maybe tonight, if I can muster the energy to get up off my fat ass and take a picture of it. We shall see.

‘Bout f’in time, no?

Posted on March 20, 2005 by admin

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:

Owen's aran sweater