Category Archives: Spinning

My Stitches West adventure

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Oy! The humanity! The Stitches West market was insane when I went on Saturday. People everywhere, most of them not paying attention to what was going on around them and stopping right in the middle of a busy walkway. The worst part was the people with the stupid pull-along suitcases. The place was so packed there was no hope of seeing the floor… or the stupid suitcases being pulled along behind someone… perfect for tripping over. Geez. Amazingly enough I did the circuit in about 2 hours. How did I manage that? I avoid all the stores that are within driving distance of my apt (it’s not like I was going to get a discount buying from them at Stitches), and I avoid places like Webs and the Yarn Barn (both of which have websites). I went around and made notes of the things I liked… I only decided what I was buying for sure after I’d seen everything. (I went to a few conventions before I developed this strategy only to find something near the end I really wanted and have no money for it.) If something seems to be going quickly I might get it when I first see it, but usually my motto at these things tends to be “If it’s not there when I go back, I wasn’t meant to buy it.” The only place with a long line that I contemplated buying something from was Carolina Homespun cause their winter hours suck, I don’t drive up to SF all that often, and I’m not fond of the navigation of their website…. and they had glow-in-the-dark yarn. But, I had a budget.

So, I present “The Haul”:


Doesn’t look like much does it? But that represents all $100 of the budget I set for myself. The nifty item I picked up for my secret pal (not shown, obviously) went on the plastic card so that I could utilize all $100 for myself. *grin* So, what is it you’re looking at? On the left is 2 ounces of cashmere fiber…. mmmmmmm. On the right is 2 skeins of Brooks Farm Duet (55% mohair/45% wool) that is currently destined to be a shawl pour moi. (I think it is highly evil of Brooks Farm to have opened a website… because now I want more… so soft. Unfortunately, a quick perusal of their new website does not have that particular color of 100% mohair I was drooling over but was $5 short of being able to get. *sigh*)

Let there be pictures

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Here you can see the baby alpaca and silk I spun up awhile ago. The dark bit is the alpaca, and the light bit is the silk. What was kind of weird about this one is the silk is more than just one color, but because the alpaca is so dark in comparison, the color changes don’t stand out. I only think this is funny cause I had spun up a different alpaca/silk set of rovings from the same person and the silk looked bland by itself, but once I plied it the color variations jumped right out.

Next, we have the roving a dyed at the dyeing class that wasn’t a few weeks ago. I know the picture looks a bit off but the camera was yelling at me about the battery being low, and using the flash made it look radioactive… probably shouldn’t have put it on a dark background either. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it yet… I’m thinking I might card each into rolags, throw them all in a bag, stir it up, and spin them in the order it comes out… or I might blend them together.

Norma was going on today about jinxed yarn and how she’s crap. But I’m inclined to say it’s not her… everything lately seems crappy. I’m sure Stephanie’s unmentionable problem is also part of the ensuing crapage. Things I have seen recently that support this theory are 1) I got paid last Monday, and they shorted me 16 hours, 2) A friend of a friend lost his daughter in a car accident on Jan 30th (thankfully, they have the alleged drunk driver in custody last I heard). So, see spectacular crap all around.

Pictures, pictures everywhere

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I finally finished my lace bookmark for the Knitted Lace bookmark exchange. I blocked it last night, and it should be going out in the mail today. I used the diagonal lace pattern from Barbara Walker’s 1st treasury.


This was my first time adding beads to my knitting. It was an interesting experiment… trying to figure out which side of the stitch a bead had to be on to get it to show the way I wanted. I think it might be fun to try this pattern again, but putting the beads in the design… so they follow the diagonal.


The Sister Shawl is progressing and looks to be done in about a week… well, at least the main body of the shawl. Then, I need to do the lace border. I’m on row 96 and can currently get about 4 rows done in 2 hours. I plan on working on it tonight, trying to get to at least row 100. Then, I have a whole bunch of free time this weekend during which I hope to get at least one repeat section (16 rows) done.


I was very happy to come home last night and find not one, but two packages waiting for me. One package was from Inspirations Yarn containing my Surprise Sock Kit. I chose the warm colorway, which got me a really pretty coppery brown yarn.


The other package was from an eBay purchase I made… a pretty purplely and silvery superwash roving. I’m thinking socks… I like socks.

Just say "Bah!"

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Due to a various number of things, I feel completely drained. However, thanks to my sister’s wedding and me selfishly taking a week off at Thanksgiving, I am out of usable hours off. This of course means that I am at work and do not want to be. This means that when I have been at home the last few days I have thought that I should work on the Sister Shawl because the wedding count-down is growing terribly short, but I say “Bah!” I have been spinning instead… spinning a little bit of silk and now a little bit of baby alpaca which are dyed to coordinate with each other. I’m about half done with the alpaca, then there will be plying. I feel like a horrible blogger since entries have been sparse, without pictures, and rambling… this entry being a prime example.

I can only hope that the pain I am experiencing in my sinuses is from the sudden drop in atmospheric pressure affiliated with the rain storm that came through last night… cause otherwise I might be sick… without an usable hours off… and a manager who won’t let me work from home even though all I do is edit stuff. A co-worker has suggested I cough on him if I do indeed turn out to be sick.

Do I have to go back?

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Back at work after a beautiful week off… if only the week had been longer… but we can’t have the week adding on extra days just for me, other people might get jealous… or pissed if they have to work. The unfortunate thing of the week off was I have come to realize that I need at least a month off from both work and school. The nervous twitch in my left eye actually went away for a couple of days; it was back this morning. *sigh*

I didn’t really get any knitting done… I finished my bookmark, so now I need to block it. I guess it will get into the mail eventually. I did get the spinning for my sister-in-law’s Christmas gift done… approximately 118 yards of fingering weight romney. I think I need to practice the whole spinning bigger. I’ve gotten damn good at spinning lace weight, which means I can’t spin anything else. Maybe if I got a lazy kate… just spin lots of lace weight singles and start making 3…5… 8-ply yarn… I’d be spinning forever in order to get anywhere.

Anyways, the yarn came out pretty nice; now I need to dye it. I don’t know my sister-in-law very well, so I have no idea what colors she likes. I was thinking of going with a green blue combo… everyone likes green and blue, right? Now to find a time my husband won’t be mad at me for making the whole apartment smell like vinegar and wet sheep.

Did I really say I didn’t get much knitting done a couple paragraphs ago? I did, look at that. *groan* I actually did work on the Sister Shawl at Thanksgiving. I can’t believe I forgot… especially since knitting seems to be one of the few ways I can impress my family. Knitted lace seems to truly amaze them, and it rocks my socks that it’s my skill they’re impressed with. I think it’s funny that my mother has told me more than once, “We never thought you’d be one to knit.” What she did think I’d do, I have no clue.

Sadly, knitting will be laid by the wayside for most of this week unless I need a stress break. Must get to work on the 15-20 page paper that is due come Saturday. Most of the work is reading all the articles and books I’ve been collecting… should have gotten started on it over the weekend, but laying around in my pajamas for a few days made me feel better. I’m such a procrastinator. At least I’m getting better… a couple years ago as an undergrad I would have just begun looking for sources right about now.

A few days of freedom

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There’s nothing quite like sleeping in… especially when you haven’t done it in awhile. I had class all weekend… Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. We had our midterm and the last of our lectures on Friday, and Saturday and Sunday were filled with processing papers, boxing them up correctly, and creating a finding aid (sort of an archive index). My group worked on personal letters* written to an enlisted guy in the Army who was stationed at Camp Roberts, CA during WWII. He was from Alameda, so there’s a local connection. We only sorted through the letters from his girlfriend/then wife, and his brother-in-law… 299 letters, cards, and telegrams altogether. It was a lot of work, but it was really interesting.

Stephanie** has left me advice on throwing the idea of relaxing my tension out the window, and by thus convincing me (wasn’t hard I think I already knew it to be a not-so-wise idea), has probably saved me many hours of frustration. Of course, I do think that part of the tension problem is from me knitting it at work. Definitely a very not-so-wise idea… at least the last few weeks… bah, who am I kidding it was a stupid idea. I had thought it would help me relax, and instead I strangled my needles with the yarn.

Now that the laundry’s done, I think I will sit myself in front of my wheel and spin up some more of the light grey romney, which I will then dye some color to be determined as a Christmas gift for my sister-in-law. I know she knits, but I have no idea what kind of stuff she likes doing, or what books she might find interesting. I figure I’ll use it as another opportunity to practice doing some dyeing, and hopefully, she’ll like it.

*One of the girls in my group had found them in an antique shop and thought they were interesting.

**Who I think is one of the greatest knitters ever (she doesn’t seem afraid to just jump right in) because she seems to have a lot of fun knitting or at least she knows how to laugh at the hard parts, although I think that comes after copious amounts of wine, which I heartily agree with as a salve for knitting frustrations.

An experiment with food coloring

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I had a skein of NZ Romney that I had spun up when I first got my wheel several months ago. Since it was the test skein for my wheel, I decided it should continue to meet its fate as a guinea pig. Thus, it was chosen as the test skein for dyeing with food coloring in my microwave.

The Results:

I left it in twisted skein form and half-submerged it in “dusty pink”… at least that’s the color the box of neon food coloring said I should get with the ratio of drops I used. When I was done with the one side, the skein was flipped and half submerged in “sky blue”… again the color according to the box. The purple, of course, came from the mixing of the two colors. Here and there, you can still see a little of the light grey the skein started out as.