Woolybuns

WIP Me Wednesday 12-31-08

Wow.  A whole week went by without a word from me.  And yes, the flying time meant I was having fun.  First there was that holiday thing.  Am I alone in thinking a wheelbarrow makes a wonderful gift?  Both of mine broke over the last couple months, so yes, opening a big box of noisiness to discover the fixin's for a nice big wheelbarrow definitely made me grin and grateful.   What also made me happy is seeing my sons embrace their new sweaters.  These guys are sweatshirt types, so this is a big departure, particularly for the younger one.  No, I didn't knit the sweaters.  If they take care of these, they might earn a handknit in the future.  Assuming I am capable of completing a sweater or two. 

Which brings me to work in progress.  My goal last week was modest because the day after Christmas, I  hit the road, destination: that good friend in southern Virginia.  Lots of heavy fog and drizzle, so we sat and statched, chatted and nibbled, and just generally enjoyed the all too brief visit. Mostly parked in Leslie's sweet fiber store, Greenberry House.  In that pleasant circumstance, I finished sock 1 and got sock 2 well underway.  And succumbed to temptation.  Could you sit in a fiber store with such yummies as Miss Babs' merino silk handpainted rovings and not empty your wallet?  The color of the first two rovings is pretty accurate, but those two in the last photo are much prettier than my camera caught.  I don't know yet what I will do with these, but possibly wet felt.  I bought them for their color and wet felt techniques tend to preserve the colorway better than spinning and knitting.  I could blend them with angora, but again, that will change the color. Layering these rovings on top of some complementary wool angora batts might be my solution, but time  will tell.  I also bought some buttons, something I rarely do.  But these just grabbed my attention.  I have no idea what I will do with these, other than store them in the possibilities file of my mind. 

I got home Monday night, later than I expected.  Normally, it's a ten hour trip, but I was on the road for 12 hours this time.  I stopped a lot.  Bored, I guess.  And took an unexpected tour around the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton airport cause I swear the exit sign said gas not airport. That little jaunt brought me through a parking lot attended by a sweet older flirt gent who was apparently as bored as I.  We traded Christmas candy and a few laughs.  I got back on the highway with a bit of cheer so it was a good goof.  By the time I got bunnies tended and tucked in for the night, I collapsed into bed.  Often times, the first couple days after a trip are pretty much a waste because of "re-entry relapse."  I decided I didn't want to do that this time, so first thing Tuesday morning, I threw on a pot of angora.  While that was stewing, I searched for and found my cormo angora worsted yarn, tied it up for dyeing, and finally got it into the dye pot.  Only 8 skeins would fit in the pot.  That gives me about 1960 yards for my sweater.  Certainly plenty for most sweaters.  I'll be knitting it bottom up (the sweater, Ewe!  Not me) so if I don't have enough for a big cowl, I'll at least have enough for the sweater.  Drying time for angora blend yarns is longer than for wool, but I might give this stuff a few minutes in the dryer to hurry that up.  I'd kind of like to start knitting on Jan. 1 to get the New Year off to a productive start.

So goals for this week: finish the 3x1 rib socks and cast on Cherry Rib Fuzz sweater.

WIP Me Wednesday 12-24-08

So I took a deep breath, exhaled calmly, ripped back on the color progression sweater, and reworked the color transition.  I don't want a jolt from one colorway to the next.  I want a smooth melt into each other flow of color change.  Yeah, I don't see that there either.  The simple fact is, it ain't gonna happen between the first two colorways so I ripped back to just the first colorway.  The success of the color meld rests entirely on colorway selection.  I need siblings but that first skein is more of a cousin.  I do have two other sibling skeins so can still knit the plan, but that makes the sweater start out purple rather than blue.  I wanted blue.  I love working with this yarn, Brooks Farm Yarn Four Play.  It earns the innuendo.  Perfect excuse to buy more, dontcha think?  Of course, that means shelving this project until after MDSW, or later if I don't go. Delayed gratification, though...  I do have 3 unrelated skeins - shades of red - that I could use for a color progression shawl to satisfy the urge. Or I could knit that vest I fell in love with at Second Sunday.   Hmmmmm....

 

The sock, on the other hand (foot?), is working quite well.  The yarn is 2 ply merino superwash that I  dyed. It's not my favorite colorway but the texture - well.  The first sock would already be done, but I keep stopping to pet it.  It squooshes so invitingly!  Goal: modest because I'll be traveling to Virginia for a few days so I may not get much knitting done but I'd like to get at least this sock finished by next Wednesday.

Man, That's Powerful Stuff

Temperatures dropped lower than expected overnight.  At 8 am, the reported temp was a whopping 0 degrees.  Boogers freeze in  your nose kind of temperatures, said one of the supposedly adult members of this household after a dash outside to start the car.  Yikes!  Hop Tuit, I thought.  Hop Tuit is a buck invaded by fur mites.  Fur mites are insidious, nasty bits of microscopic itch machines.  If a bunny shows up with dandruff, it's a good bet mites are responsible.  But fur mites are sneaky, too, and that's not always the presentation.  Sometimes the coat turns out kind of greasy looking.  I don't find any supporting literature, but experience with my herd suggests sometimes fur mites might be the cause of weepy eye.   And sometimes, the coat skips all those signs and goes straight to suicide: nice thick coat one day and what seems like overnight, suddenly it's a mass of tangles, and sloughing off in giant chunks, leaving big bald patches.  That's what happened with Hop Tuit last week, when temps were relatively warm.  At the first sign of the mass shed, I brought him in for clipping and treatment.  Since he had a wide strip of bald along his back and on both of his shoulders, I made him a bunny sweatshirt and stuffed him in it.  Hop Tuit's sweatshirt is white, and since he is a white rabbit, his sweatshirt doesn't show up very well.  So that's not Hop Tuit in the photo, but that photo better illustrates the concept.  I'm pretty sure I've posted this photo here on the blog before but can't find it in a quick search, so if you've seen it before, suck it up and enjoy it again.  As I said, when I saw what the temp was this morning, my first panicked thought was that sweatshirt wasn't enough to protect against that kind of cold for a bunny living in a hutch outside with no barn.  I threw on my own cold weather barn gear and made my way out to Hop Tuit's hutch.  The hutches are all covered with tarps to keep out wind and wet, and the tarps do help retain a bit of warmth for the bunnies, too.  As I pulled up the tarp, I kind of held my breath against the possibility that the tarp, extra food and sweatshirt weren't protective enough.  But there he was, snuggled in the sweatshirt with his own newly sprouting fiber keeping him warm.  I know in my brain and from experience that these rabbits handle amazingly cold temperatures quite well and far better than I, but the power of angora to ward off the cold continues to amaze me.  That it does so with that amazing softness is just delicious.

I Do Love Me Some Cute

While the weather provided a good excuse to laze about knitting all day, I did get some work done.  Yucky work.   Bunnies with full coats can quickly end up with nasty wet and/or dirty butts.  Bad enough at any time, but with temps predicted to sink to as low as 9 degrees, a soaking wet butt has to be well beyond uncomfortable.  So I inspected butts today.  Which means I also got to fondle angora still on the paw.  Two of the bunnies in particular caught my eye.  This delightful doe is Hop Tart, a German hybrid with really nice depth of color on a coat I'm very excited about.  Her coat is slightly longer than 3 inches, has not been brushed since her last haircut 3 months ago.  Oooo, it's gonna be a nice spin.  If, in fact, I choose to spin it myself.  She carries a dilute gene, which means bred to one of my blue bucks, she can produce black, blue, and lilac babies, and possibly chocolate.  I could breed her to Poof Bear, a pure German fella who is currently sporting a deliciously long, dense coat loaded with merino like crimp, but Hop Tart carries an albino gene, too, and that pairing would likely result in a lot of albino babies.  I don't want that.  But wouldn't these two make cute babies?  Just not until it's warmer.

For Once, I Like The Idea of Yellow

Yellow is among the colors that make me do a giant mental squinch, like I've just swigged dish soap.*   Today, though, I worked hard to earn my yellow.   Well, actually, I've been working hard for this since  early October. This morning, I went to tae kwon do a white belt, and this afternoon, I left having earned my yellow belt.  A bit sloppily, but earned it none the less.  Master will award my belt in class Monday evening.  Perhaps by then I'll have found a better photographer. 

*Bad habit: Leaving a sport water bottle half full of wet felting soapy water solution on the same surface as the current bottle of drinking water.

Fitness Friday

Today is the start of blogging about my physical fitness.  These are the tools I will be using.  Yes, Dr. D's instrument of torture is a key element of the plan.  I've been a slacker with that thing, because, ya know - Ouch!  But if I don't work at that naughty neck curve, I'm not going to improve enough with everything else.  Or worse, I'll end up like a lot of my matriarchal relatives: frail and bent in constant pain.   That prospect is worth fighting. 

I started my fitness plan, which is basically kind of loose and ... well, unplanned at this moment, with a walk.  Conveniently, a nice coffee shop is one mile away, so I walked there, had a yogurt with granola and a cuppa tea, knit a bit, then walked the mile home, so 2 miles so far.  My goal is flexibility, not weight loss. I might work on weight loss next summer (good salad weather), but for this winter (hot chocolate, casseroles, and creamy soup with hearty bread weather), flexibility and not gaining weight will do.  My goal for the next week is to figure out how to use the ball and cords establish a routine of stretching and toning exercises, and get my torture time up to 5 minutes a day. Let's hope I'm better at fitness goals than I am with knitting goals.

WIP Me Wednesday 12-17-08

See all the progress on the sweater?  No?  Yeah.  Me, either.  All my knitting has been on that sock sitting on those boxes.   The sweater sits, waiting for me to take a deep breath of resolve for that trek to the frog pond.  I need to correct the stitch count on the stockinette.  The only question is, am I better off ripping all of it out and casting on extra stitches for the seed stitch so the line of the sweater is intact or can I get away with just increasing the stockinette.  I think I need to rip all the way back.  Which is why I haven't done anything with it yet.  Maybe Friday while I wait out the snow storm that's predicted.  I can't on Thursday because I have at least two dates.  Date number one is with Mr. Garage.  I'd like to break with tradition this year and actually house my car in there.  But to do that, I have to clean it out.  Date number two is with Dr. D.  He's giving me an orthotics scan.  Sexy, huh.   I should plan date number 3 with Master Sir at the tae kwon do school.  I went tonight and had a seriously off night.    

Dates 2 and 3 are because of my biggest WIP.  Me.  More specifically, my physical self.  I feel terrific for about a half hour immediately following the end of tae kwon do class. All those feel good chemicals the brain releases with exercise.  Mmmmm.   But after that half hour of bliss, my muscles and joints start to say ummm... hey.  And my riding lessons are almost a joke.  I'm riding a dressage horse who is very sensitive to the tiniest cues.  The poor horse, Reba, must think she's got a clumsy ox up there in the saddle.  Well.  Because she apparently does.  Hence the need for my date tomorrow with Dr. D.  He told me a while ago that one of my hips is higher than the other, which also means one leg is shorter than the other.  Not by much. But apparently enough to make me resemble the Leaning Tower of Pisa.  It's most obvious apparently when I'm riding.  Crystal is constantly yelling telling me to sit up straight!  Trouble is, I think I am.  I do not feel the lean.  And the silly ankle issue from my last little trip off the steps continues.  I suspect tae kwon do is responsible for that.  Some of the kicking practice is with real targets.  Sure, the targets are pads, but the goal is to hit em hard, with a sharp snap of the lower leg at the last minute.  The ankle is fine for walking and for riding, feels perfectly normal, and doesn't hurt at all for the kicking, but oddly it complains at sitting with foot propped up, and when I'm laying down.  At those times, it aches. Kinda bass ackwards, dontcha think?   So it's time to find out where my stress points are and do something about them.  Orthotics is part of the answer.  But so is more exercise.  So starting this week, I will be adding a new recurring post here on the blog: Fitness Friday.  I need to walk and I need to stretch.  Having to post the progress publically is apparently the only best way to make myself stick with it. 

And those two boxes under the sock?  They arrived yesterday, full of a small assortment of undyed yarn.  Mostly superwash merino, some BFL.  There will be play time soon!

Where Chocolate Leads

The idea of chocolate pasta desserts intrigues me.  I did a bit of googling to see if I could find a source for more chocolate pasta should my first encounter prove delightful.  I found it.  And - oh!  More.   This place offers truffles, turtles and fudge, cordials, chunks and bars, chocolate brandy beans, dark chocolate Jack Daniels, Scharffen Berger, Choc-aids - little chocolate bandage strips to make boo boos not that bad after all.  A wine lover's gift pack of chocolate - sorry, temporarily sold out, as is the Jack Daniels, Jose Cuervo, and Kahlua gift packs.  And in the novelty section, along with the chocolate pasta, there is - for those "feeling playful and creative," Chocolate Body Frosting, which, the ad copy promises, has many uses: fruit dip, sundae topper, dessert drizzle, and - oh, yeah.  Setting the mood.  They even offer it in a flavor assortment of "wild cherry, midnight mocha, original sin, espresso dream, and red raspberry" so you can "stir up something exciting no matter what the event or treat."  And if that's not playful enough for you, there is the Strip Chocolate Game "sure to provide hours of fun," and Strip Chocolate Checkers for a version of the game you wouldn't play with your grandmother - well, maybe someone else's grandmother, but not your own. 

Carpe Giftum indeed.

Carpe Giftum

Sunday was the annual Second Sunday Fiber Artisans holiday celebration.  The main feature of the day is our version of Yankee Swap.  Our rules tend to change a smidge every year because they aren't written down and everybody has a version of the rules.  Rule number one never changes though: keep it fun!  Next important feature: it isn't the swap that's important.  It's getting and keeping the gift you want.  Lucky is the person who gets to pick first, because that person also gets to pick or steal last.  I drew number 10 out of 16.  Someone else, a child, had already opened a gift I took a fancy to.  When it was my turn, I surveyed all the opened presents and yes, I confess.  In spite of her coached by mom please don't steal my gift eyes, I ended up stealing the gift from the child.  The gift?  A wrought iron basket filled with candles scented with cotton fiber (!), a memo pad, and a bag of chocolate - Yes!  Chocolate - pasta with recipes on the bag for chocolate pasta desserts.  How could I not steal that??!!  There's grand marnier and raspberries in one recipe, fergoodnesssakes.  And it was the candles the child wanted so I gave them to her.  See?  I'm not Scrooge.

We also had a festive socks contest.  Since I was donating the prize, I wore my felt boots instead of festive socks.  Aren't these great socks?  The winner, by unanimous decision, were the socks that light up, the red ones in the center.  Another sock deserves attention, though it wasn't entered in the contest because so far there is only one, and it apparently is destined to be a one and only, serving it's maker, Vivienne, as her Christmas stocking to be hung with care.  BTW, if you're looking for mohair, Vivienne's got some Nice. Stuff.  I bought 6 pounds of washed fleece from her earlier this year - yum! 

Seems like this year's party turned into a de facto fashion show.  Isn't this vest gorgeous??  The pattern is from Shear Spirit and I am in love with it.  I'm thinking of some of my handspun, cormo/angora in Carribbean shades.  And then there was Tilly with her scarves.  She wore a knitted lace scarf, gifted a woven scarf, and showed off some of her fabulous nuno felt scarves.  So much talent in one woman!  She does sell scarves - sold that blue one right out from under me before I could speak up!  I don't have an email address right at hand to link to, but if anyone is interested, I can connect you. 

All in all, quite a fun day.

A Crank, A Rod, Some Leather and I'll Be Ready To Get Warped.

That's the conclusion on my loom.  Some Murphy's and TLC will make it even better.  The intro to weaving program was jam packed with information, some of which I missed because I kept getting phone calls from home.  Note to self: turn phone off next time.  We learned terminology, how to read a pattern, what to know about yarn for weaving, and how to wind a warp.  Next program will be warping the loom. Myra, who presented the program, is a knowledgeable, attractive and animated speaker.  My camera did not do justice to her.  The intro program tickled some neurons, so I guess I'll be making a trip to Harrisburg at some point to get replacement parts for the loom.  Funny thing about that: mention you're planning a fibery field trip and suddenly you have new travel companions.  Another thing to love about guild meetings. 

Then there was the food.  December guild meetings tend to double as holiday parties and this gathering was no different.  Because I am allergic to shellfish - I tend toward anaphylactic reactions - I try to find out what's in blended foods or stay away from those I can't identify.  So I felt comfortable with a yummy looking dish labeled horseradish and onion dip.  I dipped a cracker in just a bit for a taste and as I swallowed, someone else moved the bowl.  Hidden under the bowl was the rest of the label: clam.  Oops.  Sure enough, about 10 minutes later, my tongue started tingling.  I mentioned to one woman what had just happened.  Turns out she carries benedryl for her own allergy issues, so I took a couple.  While that interrupted the allergic response, it left me with a different problem.  Benedryl whups my butt. A serious whupping.  It's an odd combination of limp noodle and lead balloon.  And I was 75 minutes from home, driving alone, in serious need of a nap. Solution: I kind of bunny hopped from one Dunkin' Donuts to the next all the way home.   By the time I got home, I had enough energy left to ask my daughter to feed the rabbits for me before I zonked out.  When I finally woke up, I finished my mystery project. 
Toasty warm felted boots.  I have very happy feet now.

And that was just Saturday.  Second Sunday Fiber Artisans also met this weekend.  I bet you can guess which day.  I'll tell you about that next post.