The results of the first half of the Sheep to Shoe kit from Blue Moon Fiber Arts:

A castle. Can’t remember where this is… Whidbey Island? Port Angeles? Port Townsend? Something. It’s some guy’s very-out-of-character-for-the-neighborhood house:

One of my coworkers, slurping up the last of his panang curry with a straw on a dare: (yeah, not from the morning commute, but on the phone…)

The defective goose. This is the same piling that the seagulls use later in the summer. Bear in mind that goslings don’t fly, and that’s about a 20′ drop to the water. (I found out later that the day after they hatched the goose pitched each baby over the edge at high tide to another goose waiting below, who flipped them upright, and then the whole family swam away. Say it with me: “awwwwww!”)

Random downtown building on valentines day.

The marquee at the Lusty Lady. The marquee gets changed on a several-times-a-week basis, and is almost always funny. It’s one of the things that the group I ride the ferry and bus with always make a point of checking out on our way by. I should probably add a page just for this, and see if I can keep up with them so you can all share the amusement.

And… the first sub that I saw go through. And yes, I realize you can’t really tell that blob is a submarine, but it is. If what I read was correct, that’s the Seawolf (although might be the Jimmy Carter).

There’s been work. And a (not very) Random Stranger From The Internets (ok, so maybe not really a *stranger* – we’ve “known” him for about 3 years, but this was the first time we’d actually met him all in person like). And a wedding (not mine). And some more work. And Very Little Knitting. But hey! I have pictures, so it’s all good, right?

There was a gigantic shawl knit for Melissa of Peace Weavers (which I swear I have a picture of, but I can’t find it to save my own life. Ang? Help?) edit! Found it! (It’s the Lady Of The Forest shawl from Ilga Leja)

And then there was the RSFTI, who we adored before we met, and are utterly smitten with now. (Along with most of the bride’s female relatives…)
This one being my favorite pic of him from the weekend – he’s the one on the left, the guy on the right being another one of Critter Boy’s imaginary friends, who flew in from Hawaii for the meetup (on his way to somewhere else I think).

Lastly, the “what I did with my summer weekend” series… The label on the roving claimed it to be biffle from Dicentra in the Eomund colorway. I believe the biffle and Dicentra bits, but from the pics I’ve seen online, I’m not buying that it’s the Eomund colorway. No clue which one it is, but probably not what it was labeled as. Whatever, though. It’s purty.
Pre-drafted goodness:

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.

Hooray for xmas! Go Booger with your fibery self!

While up in BC this past weekend, Angela gave me a little bump of wool in various shades of green and blue and rust(?)*, which as I’m pretty sure I mentioned at some point below, I spun up on Sunday morning. Last night and this afternoon I took a bunch of pictures of it. NONE of which really show what it actually looks like. (*I’m red/green colorblind, so, really, wtf do I know about it?). This one:

I think is the closest. I could be wrong. See above. The others… not quite. See? and see? and again with the not quite. And yes, totally wrong. Meh. Whatever. It’s green. With some other pretty colors in it. And it’s soft. And nice. And no, I haven’t measured it yet, so I don’t know how much I ended up with when all was said and done.

Moving right along.

Disastah! Terrah!
I’ve been working on a SUPER SECRET PROJECT (and, oh bugger, here I go showing a bunch of pictures of it… sheesh), and was cruising along until I got to the 11th damn pattern repeat. At which point it all went to crap. THREE TIMES. I had to completely reknit repeat 11 twice (I forget why now. short attention span, I know), and was 5 or 6 rows into repeat 12 when I noticed: BIG GODDAMNED HOLE. Not only was it a BGDH, mind you, but it was (insert much profanity here) many, many rows BELOW the last lifeline. What’s a girl to do? Each row is…. um… lots of stitches at this point. 5+155+37+155+5. That many. No way no how was I going to rip it ALL back and redo that many stitches and rows and omg it’s garter stitch and please make it stop. But oh ho! I am crafty!

Check it out, yo:
First things first: Gather your supplies.

Here we have: the offending piece of knitting (the pink blob), the pattern, a good magnifying lamp, needles, scissors, and yummy Canadian microbrew (and, apparently, a can of highly flammable spray-stuff in the background, just in case…). Wait! Where is the chocolate?! Crap. Oh well. Soldiering on.

Then! Um. I forget what comes next so Unicorns! Unicorns make everything better.

Ok, ok. Moving right along with the repair project.
I guess now is the time to really look at what we’re up against:

And then? What then?
Rip it! Rip it good! (just make sure you’ve put a lifeline in at the bottom of the section you are gonna fix.

Then you just pick up the stitches along the lifeline and go to town. Really.

Here we have, I think, 4 rows reknit.

And here we have 8 rows reknit, with only 13 to go. But I was tired, and I started making mistakes which had to be unknit and reknit and… decided to stop for the night.

There you have it. Updates! Photos! And yeah, I’ll post another picture when I get the reknitting of the lace section finished.

Edit: In response to Angela’s question in the comments, here’s how I did the green spinning:
I weighed the whole thing, and then just divvied it up into three roughly equal piles without regard to color. Then I split each sliver up into three or four lengthwise pieces, laid them on my left knee, and just grabbed them randomly as I spun. From that I got three bobbins full, which I then plied. I probably should have done it as a two-ply instead of a three-ply, but I really liked the way it came out as a three-ply.

And… I finished the repair on the lace last night. I still have to go through and even out the stitches in a couple of places in that section, but I figure that can wait until I block it (if any of you know different, PLEASE tell me now!). Pictures to follow, probably over the weekend.

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.

Where, oh where, shall we start? Hmmm? ooh! Cake! Yes, let’s start with CAKE!

What you can’t quite see is that the sprinkles on top spell out “happy knitting”. The Booger made that and brought it down for me. It’s got everything a cake should have. Cakey goodness, lots of frosting, Teddy Grahams, and sprinkles. Sweet!

The other thing she brought with wasn’t quite so sweet. At least not quite so sweet smelling…

and let me just say that it’s a damn shame that computer monitors aren’t scratch n’ sniff, ‘cos that, my friends, stinks to high heaven.

Stinky up close!

O and I spent about half the day Saturday washing half of that fleece. For size comparison, the tire and bumper you see in the corner there are a full-size Dodge pickup. That fleece is huge. And did I mention the stinky part? We’re pretty sure that one is from one of the Scottish Blackface rams on the island. They’re fairly wild critters, roaming freely in the woods most of the year up there, so the fleece is chock full of vegetable matter and is kind of matted in places. And it stinks.

Decatur has a sizeable herd of sheep going at this point. Most of them are Scottish Black Face, and a few are Dorsets. The annual island sheep shearing was the last weekend in April, and since they just give away all the fleeces, O asked for and got some. Ten of them. TEN. Eesh. That’s a LOT of stinky. She has big plans for all of it, though, so it’s all good.

Speaking of stinky things that come in groups of ten…
Chicklet update!

They’re continuing to grow, and DAMN if they’re not cute anymore. So sad. Chicklet gallery updated with current pix. Enjoy.

And, just to prove that I haven’t totally lost interest in spinning…

That’s spun up from some mystery batts that I got from Franquemont Fibers on eBay. It’s lovely stuff that’s been a joy to spin. And it has sparkly stuff in it, which is a total bonus. No clue what was in the batt, but it’s mostly wool with some other stuff.

There’s been more, I just don’t have pix to show of any of the rest of it. O’s Rogue is coming along – we’re down to one and 2/3 sleeve left. She better not outgrow it before I finish it…

So there. I may not have gotten to go to MS$W, but I had a damn fine MD weekend anyway.

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.