Woolybuns

It Just Kinda Sneaks Up On Ya

Evil.  It's everywhere.  I left the house yesterday with some innocent plans: stop in at a new to me SnB at a Starbucks a town or two over, have lunch and knit, then head over to Michael's Crafts to pick up a few (quit laughing!) supplies for my mixed media class.  Step one just as planned.  A nice lunch meeting some nice new people and probably the cutest baby I've ever seen (well.  except for mine) and a bit of progress on a new sock (cherry tree hill cherry blossom colorway, size 1 circs, 2 x 1 rib).  The first hint of evil showed up with the mother of that adorable baby.  I told you - it's everywhere!  She brought two bags full of free yarn.  I politely selected one skein of wool.  But those bags kept coming back.  I couldn't help it.  Some of them have promise for the mixed media class.  Yeah, that pile over there is now in my stash.   Then it was time to leave  and the real Pixisis  revealed herself.  She seemed so sweet, so nice, very ebullient and fun.  Turns out, that's just a facade.  She's evil.  "We're walking over to the yarn shop next door, you coming?"  I politely demurred.  I needed craft supplies, not yarn.  "Oh, come on."  No, really.  "We just go for the socializing."  Oh.  Well, it behooves me to be polite with new folks, right?  Yeah.  Well.  There was that wall of koigu.    And not only Pixisis, but three other  pushers ladies all saying "Ooooooooo buy more."  I tried - I. Really. tried - to ward off those evil powers.  And then they said "25% discount to SnBers."  You'd have caved, too. 

Expanding My Horizons Instead of Maximizing My Gluteus

For those of us whose winter exercise alternates between huddling and shivering, January encourages a butt load of weight.  I needed a diversion.  What better diversion for anything that ails you than learning something new?  The way my blood vessels turn tail and cower at just a hint of mercury recession, that something new ain't gonna be on a ski slope, no matter how tantalizing the tales from another.  I surfed through bloglines and found a delicious something I'd been drooling over for a while.  A Sue Bleiweiss  online class.  Tissue paper fabric, brown paper bag journals, decorated boxes - what fun!  I got the first lesson on Tuesday.  Since I'm still trying to carve out work surfaces in my jumbled cave of chaos, I have only done part of the first lesson.  I turned tissue paper into decorated fabric.  Sorry, no tutorial nor photos of the process.  That's what Sue sells so my revealing techniques just wouldn't be right .  But this is my result: a piece of fabric ready to be turned into ... well, whatever I can dream up, I suppose.  I made some progress with the space carving last night and  hope to take a big step with that today because I really want to get my hands into more of this surface design stuff.

I'd Slap It Silly, But It Already Is

Writing a blog post is fun.  Making changes to the blog is a Pain. In. The. Ass.  Ok, for some of you, it's second nature.  Not so for me.  I'm not stupid.  No.  Really, I'm not.  I've had that tested.  But this technology stuff totally kicks my ass.  See?  I've already cussed twice in this post because of it.  I decided to add a Paypal widget, an operation described as "easy."  So how come that easy operation messed up my sidebar content?  Things I did not touch went kerflooie.  I've just spent the last couple hours trying to fix them.  I didn't succeed.  See over there the two listings for "Bunnies" and "Bunnies for Sale"?  All that writing in the second version is supposed to be visible only after you click on the album.  Not listed separately and duplicately.  But nothing I've found changes the fact that there it is.  So I decided to let it sit there for now.  You know, ignore it.  Ignore it long enough and it will modify it's behavior to get attention, right?  Ok, so perhaps a good sleep overnight will magically change it back to the way it were.  Well.  I'm still not stupid, so I know that's not going to happen.  But maybe my subconscious will figure this shit out. 

All the other changes to the look of the blog?  Well, the widget size is not changeable at this time.  If I want it to fit and not look grotesquely overweight, I have to choose 1) a format designed  to fit the widget, or 2) manually resize the column to fit the widget.  Uh huh.  You did read that sentence up there about technology and my ass, right?  So I took the coward's way out and chose the format that fits the widget.  But.  Ya know?  I like it. 

Except that all this time I spent working out what I could meant I didn't fully load the widget.  It's there but pitifully low on inventory.  I'll work on it.  After a good night's sleep.

If At First You Don't Succeed, Ply, Ply Again

Plying from a center pull ball.  It sounds like a perfect solution: spin up one bobbin not quite full of singles, then wind those singles into a center pull ball and ply from both ends.  You end up with an overfull bobbin of 2 ply and no left over singles.  But we all know what a tangled web we weave with those center pull balls of hell singles.  Who of you who have tried have not shrieked and gnashed teeth and thrown a fit that mass of hopeless knots across the room?  Why do the stupid things tangle like that? 

Wobble.  Cute in a weeble but deadly in winding a center pull ball.  I used to use one of those plastic blue-and-white ball winders (did you catch the wince from that guy over there?  Orifice hook is another term which gets the giggle going leads to funny faces).  I didn't like the plastic thing.  Too small for some of the bigger bobbins, for one thing.  And I blamed the cheap little bastard it for all those tangles.  I lusted after a bigger better tool.  And a vendor who showed up at a spinning gathering had a Fricke Jumbo Ball Winder for sale.  I snatched that sucker right up.  And had a cranky fit because I still got tangles. Just not always.  I'd get perfect balls just often enough to keep me trying.  And tangles often enough to leave me bald.  I needed to understand why I couldn't get the damn tool to work the way I wanted it to.  The way it should work.  During one conversation with a stranger about this frustration, the fella explained the problem was a physics issue.  In laymen's terms: wobble.  The center pull ball needs precision to lay the yarn evenly, both in tension and in line.  Skeined yarn on a swift plays well with a ball winder.  Energized singles on a bobbin often don't.  See those peaks and valleys the singles form on a non-woolee winder bobbin?   In the ball winding,  those valleys mean a sudden shift in the tension  which makes the winder wobble, so the  yarn doesn't wind on in  the absolute precise line needed for a tangle free experience.  Speed is a factor in all this too.  It's kind of boring so I don't know about you, but I want to rip through that step as fast as possible. But  that speed increases the jump over the yarn valley which increases the tension shift and that makes the yarn veer off track.   

Enter Otto Strauch, who bought  the Fricke ball winder design a few years ago.  He made some modifications to the design to better deal with wobble.  I handed my ball winder to Otto at a fiber festival and he returned it to me at the next fiber festival, nicely upgraded to the  new design.  It works so much better!  But, peaks and valleys, speed, fuzzies are all still factors.  So is height of the ball winder guide relative to the bobbin and the angle of the yarn from bobbin to ball winder.  Straight line is essential. 

Yesterday, I finished spinning the small batt of corrie x, angora, and silk. It's the finest (as in thin) spinning I've ever done.  I didn't have another batt to spin on a second bobbin and I didn't want to screw it up with tangles.  So I took a deep breath, forced myself to use patience and closely watch the track of the single on the ball winder.  And there's what I got.  Ain't it purty? Two final considerations for successful plying from a center pull ball: 1) keep something in the center to keep it from collapsing on itself (thumb works quite well), and 2) ply when you can devote your entire attention without interruption.  You don't want to put the ball down in mid-ply, especially if you use your thumb or finger as the something to keep the center from collapsing.  If you have to take the ball off your finger, carefully put something else in there, making sure the strands don't cross in the process.
 
My efforts yesterday paid off.  To the left is the freshly plied but unwashed skein.  On the right is the skein after washing.  It's a half ounce, 114 yards.  I am pleased.

Now on Lovely Miss Hall: cherry chocolate, a blend of natural chocolate polwarth wool and gray angora over dyed cherry red.  Yum!

Cat Tales

I love cat sillies.  This post  has a photo that captures someone else's cat in an unintentional moment of mirth.   It brought to mind some fun memories.  We had a big blue tiger cat who was a bit stump like in the intelligence department.  Sweet and beautiful but not altogether plugged in.  I often spotted him perched on top of the kids' gym set.  A big wooden thing  with a long hollow metal tube at the top connecting all the elements. Birds liked to nest in that tube.  The cat would sit at the end of the tube, on top of it, and stick his head down into the end of the tube to peer in at the little birdies.  We always imagined the poor little birds freaking out over the upside down hairy monster taking their sunlight. Then one day I got the biggest laugh out of the foolish cat. He climbed up to his bird view,  took his position complete with head stuck upside down in the end of the tube ... and lost his balance.  He did a kind of frantic loopy loop, grabbing wildly with his paws at thin air and fwoomp!  Down on the ground.  Only thing injured was his dignity.  He shook his tale and stomped off.  I'm pretty sure I heard little birdy giggles over the cussing from the cat.  I don't know if that fwoomp was a common occurence but I only saw it the once.  And - damn! -  no camera on hand. Not that I could have captured it in photos anyway - too fast and I was laughing too much.  It's one of the stories we trot out at family gatherings.  So what ridiculous thing does your cat do?

Wednesday WIPing 1/23/08

How sweet it is.  316 yards of spun softness.  My first skein from the lovely new wheel.  The fiber: Tranquility, my blend of angora and cormo.  I spun a single of three ounces, then  wound it into a center pull ball and 2 plied it from both ends of the ball.  I'm not sure which pleases me more, the spun result or the spin as it happened.  In any case, there will be more of it, enough for some kind of knitting project. 

Pretty much the instant I finished plying and skeining Tranquility, I pulled out a batt I made a couple months ago and started playing with that on Lovely Miss Hall.  Insert Tim Taylor's famous "oh oh oh oh oh" sounds of satisfaction here.  Thin, baby.  Thin.  And I'm loving it.  I've only got one ounce of this prepared.  I started with a few test handfuls of some locks of pure love, a soft moorit corrie x fleece I picked up at SAFF, I think in 2006.   I washed the fleece  here at home in my washing machine, pulled out a handful for fast drying, then decided those locks deserved a bit of menage a trois so I sent them through my drum carder with equally lovely ladies Fawn Angora and Tussah Silk.  The batt looks a bit neppy, but a thin spin seems to be taking care of that.  As I spun, visions of diaphanous lace floated through the old noggin.  I've got just shy of two pounds of these locks.  I'm debating: do I send it off for blending or tackle the whole thing myself?  A very long term WIP if I do it all myself but what lot of fabulous fondling I'd get out of it.  And perhaps learn not to nep.

The mittens: not quite finished but close.  My goal: finish them today. It's damn cold out there.  I'm not crazy about the how the thumbs are coming out but if the recipient doesn't like them, they'll become barn  mittens for me. 

That's about all I got done with fiber this past week.  Doing more of other things and less of fibering gives my neck a rest from all that looking down.  But less fibering is it's own pain the neck!

Wednesday Wiping 1/16/08

I've been knitting in spite of that wheely lovely distraction.  Not much progress on the kidney project - the shaping is kicking my butt. I think the frustration of that has led to startitis.  On my active needles at the moment are mittens for my daughter, socks for me, and a pair of ribbed mitts/swatch.  I stopped working on the mittens this afternoon so my daughter could try them on for fit, and when she did, discovered I knit too much.  So I have to rip back several rows.  I started these ribbed mitts as a swatch for an EZ EPS sweater for me, but since I don't like to swatch, decided a pair of mitts fit the bill.  So I cast on 36 stitches and just started ribbing,intending to switch to stockinette for the palms.  Along the way, I decided that continuing the rib suited my fancy. I just had to figure out the gusset stitches.  And then I sat down at a coffee shop with the winter issue of Knitter's.  Right smack in the middle of the magazine is a pattern called Cozy Confetti, an accessories set of hat, dickey and ribbed mitts.  With 36 stitches cast on.  Ain't that just convenient!  I also decided this yarn is not the yarn for the EZ EPS I want to knit.  More about that next Wednesday.  And finally, I need to have a pair of socks on the needles too.  Comfort knitting, I suppose.  Simple stockinette using Trekking and size 2 circs.

Goals for next Wednesday: finish the mittens.  Get a handle on the kidney pattern.  Finish at least one of the mitts.  Make some progress on the socks. 

On the new wheel: Tranquility, spun thinner than what I've been spinning on Sonata. Major color distortion in this photo.   That's about 2 ounces so far.  I'd like to get another ounce on that bobbin, then spin a second bobbin of 3 ounces for plying together, but since I'm flitting off to Maine this weekend if the weather allows, I don't think I will get that much spinning done before next WIPing.  It's a very nice spin, though, so anything is possible.

Sheesh

I thought you guys were being pretty quiet, especially about the new wheel.   And, ya know, you get something really delicious, it's disappointing to have it ignored.   But I just noticed the comment count was a lot higher than I remembered, so I checked the comment list.  You did comment!  Thanks!  But, your comments are not getting sent to my email like they are supposed to.  Sheesh!  Bad timing, Typepad!  I hope it's fixed right quick.  But for now, please know I'm not ignoring you. 

Another One?????

Heh.  Yep.  I bought another spinning wheel.  If anyone is keeping track, this makes wheel number 9.  Not including the two I sold a couple years ago.  Yes, I currently own 9 spinning wheels.  One lives with my sister not too far from Philly.  But, ya know, each wheel serves a different purpose.  First, and the one living with my sister, is an Ashford Traditional, a decent wheel, and as my first, it holds strong sentimental value.  It's not a good travel wheel, though.  Wheel number 2: Majacraft Rose.  Until a couple days ago, it was my favorite all around wheel.  Rose can do it all, and travel too.  Then my mother gave me a Roberta, an electric wheel.  I love it for plying, and the fact that it has a history.  My mom inherited Roberta from an elderly spinning guild buddy.  This woman loved her fiber friends and when she died, she left each of them a portion of her fiber stuff.  My mom got the Roberta and a handspun, handknit lace half circle shawl.  Mom still snuggles in the shawl but never really got attached to Roberta.  I love Roberta for plying.  She is unfortunately in need of a bit of repair - something to do with the speed control.  Then because it was so cute, I got a Kromski Mazurka and then my husband bought me a surprise Christmas present, a Kromski Polannaise.  Both are lovely wheels, but require more fiddling than my mind can handle, so I sold them both.  Soon after that, I discovered the delights of a Canadian Production wheel, and the evil woman who introduced me to that delight also pronounced those magical words: it's for sale.  That coincided with an unexpected bonus so the wheel came home with me.  After that, my wheel population kind of stablilized.  Until Molly joined my house and cracked up my sweet Rose.  I needed a travel wheel in a hurry for a pending spinning demo, and in the "need to buy a wheel" mindset, stumbled over a lovely antique wheel that's really much more eye candy than practical spin on it wheel.  And since it wasn't that expensive, I bought it.  And then found a Kromski Sonata within driving distance, and at a good price, and that fit the need for a travel wheel.  Of course, while searching for a replacement spinning wheel, I stumbled over another can't miss deal.  An original Rick Reeves saxony.  When your soul needs feeding, how can you pass on such a find?  And immediately after that, the Bosworths presented a program on charkha spinning and under the spell of the magic created by introducing that sweet little book charkha to the angora blend roving in my hand - well.  Yes, I ordered one.  With the purchase of the charkha, I figured my wheel buying days were done.  With that assortment of wheels, what could I fall in love with that I could justify the cost?  W E L L.  When I got home from SAFF last October, I found an email in response to a blog post about needing a new wheel since the dog broke my primary wheel.  Blogless but Raveler Kim had a wheel.  But no, not just any wheel.  A delicious treasure of a wheel, one I thought I could only dream about someday owning.  And Kim lives within easy distance of my sister who has my Ashford Traditional.  Just a couple phone calls and the plans were set.  On Saturday, my sister and I drove over to Kim's and I fell in love.  It took about 2 seconds.  The wheel came home with me.  How convenient that barely an hour after I got back home with the wheel already in my car, it was time to go to spinning guild and show off.  So here you go, my new wheel:

This beauty is a 1983 Norm Hall Norwegian wheel, in solid cherry.  With three big huge bobbins.  I. Love. This. Wheel. 

Frownie Face

I said goodbye to a friend over the weekend, the 4 legged kind.  Wilma died at some point over the weekend. She was an unlikely companion given that veiled chameleons are about as antisocial a being as exists on this planet.  They don't even like each other.  But I think, over the years, Wilma learned to trust me.  Every so often, when I opened the door to her space, instead of her usual swift change from pastel green to mottled black to demonstrate distaste, she would instead make a beeline for my arm as a conduit to the larger world.  She often still mottled on my arm, but quickly changed back to pastel green once settled on me.  From my arm, she would crawl up to the top of my head and seemed to enjoy a stroll about the house.  This is not usual for a veiled chameleon, and she would not do this with other people.  Others got hissed and gaped at, occasionally even struck and sort of bit, if the hissing and gaping weren't immediately obeyed.  But Wilma often ate her "cream filled" worms, her version of candy, straight from my hand, a dining practice I worked at achieving, and that is how she learned to trust me.   That and her watering.  Veiled chameleons will not drink standing water.  It has to have motion before they recognize it is water.  So I used a plant sprayer to mix up her water solution and sprayed her and her plant daily.   It is a routine I now miss.  Wilma was not a loving creature, but certainly a fascinating one.