Some people are not sheep

I love how individualistic fiber people are!

    at SAFF 2011, the weather was perfectly cool for wearing wool. I saw not only miles of fibery goodness, but great numbers of spinners, knitters and weavers parading past wearing their fabulously individualistic hand work. Sure, I did see numerous iterations of certain shawl patterns that are very popular on Ravelry right now, but it was obvious that none of them were in kit form. They were different from each other not just in yarn choice, but in many little adaptations and special touches and colors so perfectly suited to compliment the wearer…sigh…it was truly inspirational.

Sadly, I have no photos, I took my camera, but Susannah and I were so busy in our booth teaching spinning that I didn’t have time to get it out. Which brings me to the second most marvelous thing about both SAFF and “Fiber in the Boro” which I attended this weekend (a wonderful show, kudos to the organizers!) There is a huge upswing in people interested in learning to spin!

People who want to set down their gadgets and get down to something that is really real. Learn something that allows you to use your own two hands, while touching something that was grown out  on 4 feet that don’t do much else but eat grass and bask in the sunshine…..Ah, it does the old heart good!

      

Now this is a little unrelated, but I came home from the fiber festivals with lots of little balls of uneven yarn from demoing the spindolyn. This happens every time, lots of little snippets of demo yarn. I show one of these balls of yarn here riding on the back of the strangest trombocino squash I have ever grown…it looks sort of like a long neck goose.

     

The trees above looked like this one day, and naked the next, after a big rain and wind storm..yep, winters on it’s way.

Autumn Spinning, Knitting and gee, time to get out the woolies!

I believe I mentioned that I bought some lovely rainbow roving  top last year at SAFF, and it took me almost a year to get around to spinning it, should have started sooner, as it is a super-wash merino, not at all compacted, spins like a dream and is my current favorite thing on the spindolyn.

 

Actually, I should have bought more of it, but although I can remember the location of the booth of the talented dyer at SAFF last year, I lost the card that came with the fiber, and can’t remember her name. Finding her (hopefully) again this year is one of my quests for this year.   I leave in about 29 hours…am I ready? Nah, still polishing spindolyns and packing…so why am I blogging? .needed to put my feet up for just a bit, and am just too excited to be quiet.

It really is a fun fiber festival, all that inspirational wool walking around, not just in the booths, or on the backs of the attending fiber animals, but being worn by talented attendees, lovely work every where you look. Sweaters and shawls and hats and vests, oh my!

What was I saying.. oh, so I divided this top into by splitting it in to two equal strips.Weighing them to make sure.

I have spun the first half up on the harmonic spindolyn and have a good start on the second one already…

but you know how when you are spinning and daydreaming about what you will knit, you get a hankering to go ahead and knit…this little lust was dancing around in my head while passing through my LYS and I couldn’t pass up this merino singles, so soft, so yummy and with those autumn colors…and so I started knitting this basket-weave something or other….(I think it is going to be a cowl)

And now that I have gotten that going, I can merrily go back to spinning!

If you come find yourself at SAFF, do come by and say howdy!, Susannah and I’s booth is near the front door, across from the restrooms.

Sneak Preview New Spindles for SAFF!

     Autumn is here and we can start looking forward to a wonderful winter of cozy spinning and knitting, but first…..the fall fiber festivals!!
        I will again be at SAFF (South Eastern Animal Fiber Forum) in Asheville Oct 21-23 and am busy, busy in the wood shop making spindolyns in cherry, walnut, tulip poplar as well as oak, and in many different sizes.
        It has been a particularly fun time, as pressure always makes me have new ideas, and I have been trying out some new spindle designs and new base designs to accommodate the new harmonic spindolyn size.

The weather has been lovely, the leaves are starting to change, I have a really pretty sock on the knitting needles and there is a pumpkin sitting on my table, what could be better?

If you come to SAFF, drop by and say hello!

Mo Bigger! the new Harmonic Spindolyn!

Well, finally!
I have been fiddling with a bigger diameter spindolyn for a while, and kept running into weight issues slowing it down.
I have also been wanting to make a spindolyn out of tulip poplar, one of my favorite woods, but it is too light weight.
Can you see where this is going? duh. Sometimes we can't see the forest for the trees, but then two things happened.
My friend Lisa, a new spinner, sent me this photo of her lovely beginning efforts, and I was stunned at how much she was able to stack on to her spindolyn, and I thought, man! I really need to come up with a bigger spindolyn for plying, and quit just thinking about it.

And then I was pushed over the edge to jump up from my computer and go out to the shop and just "do it" when a lovely customer, and member of the Ravelry Spindolyn Spinners group, Annette, wanted to add to her spindolyn collection and asked ever so nicely for a bigger spindolyn.

And so the "Harmonic" Spindolyn was born, and I can't stop spinning on it long enough to do any knitting. I am a happy spinner!
It is made with tulip poplar, and is 3 1/2" in diameter.

 

 

And it holds ALOT!

 

Hot Weather Knitting

We are not daintily perspiring here, we are dripping.
Frequent cold cloths to the face have been necessary in order to not just flat out keel over.

I have hit the age where my facial skin is now "tender" (awww)

I am also at the age where I found myself griping like an old grouch when I went to pick up a couple of new wash clothes to replace my old, holey wash (face) cloths...."sheesh! they don't make them like they used to!"

 The wash cloths I found were either too thick and heavy to ever dry out in our southern humidity, or they were just plain scratchy.

I ask you,  how does cotton get scratchy? I think there is more in that cotton than just cotton..

I guess labels these days lie, just like politicians

On the very day that I picked up a ball of cotton to knit my own washcloth, a knitting friend of mine emailed me, saying she wished people would knit something more challenging than dishcloths. 

Unbeknownst to her, I felt duley challenged.

 I made it more difficult on myself by promptly misplacing my yellow dishcloth yarn, found an alternative (but ugly) brown, cream and green ball of peaches and creame, and scoured Ravelry for patterns that offered some spicyness of language when you loose your place in them.

I picked 4 patterns from Ravelry, and present 3 here in order of most challenging to least.

   I began with the pattern called "vortex six" by Rebecca Hudson..she has a series of neat vortex dishcloths..meditative, but I admit, a bit more challenging in the heat than I was looking for, I stopped mine after 5 rounds, instead of 6, cause the yarn was ugly (photo A) and I was hot.

Mine does not look like hers, I will go back to this pattern in cooler weather and with two colors of yarn at a later date.

photo A

Next, I decided that some thinner cotton in a bit more open stitch would dry quicker in the terrible humidity, and got this yellow varigated mercerized cotton purchased from my LYS Traditions in Lafayette, TN, for which I promplty lost the ball band or I would tell you the brand....I like the way it knit up, but the varigation had lovely orange, yellow, white and ....gray??  this would be very pretty if they left out the gray varigation, as it makes the cloth look "pre dirtied" However, the mercerized actually does make a nice, soft, quick drying wash cloth.

The cloth is smaller than it looks, because the rubber ducky is actually a "mini ducky" The pattern is the Petal Dishcloth by Susan Esser, it is knit list archived. It was a little easier to follow whilst one is daintily dabbing ones forehead with the previous cloth.



I totally screwed up on this last one, but it is a great pattern, easy peasy, it is the Starfish Cloth by Dione Reed of Sew Funky. I intentionally used a little bigger needles, thinking quick drying again, but I went a little too far and it flops around like a jelly fish rather than a starfish. I also decided that I wanted it to be anatomically correct (to a starfish, that is) and so only made 5 arms rather than the 6 the pattern calls for, so fudged the rows a little randomly to accomodate than, and one of the arms looks like it was whacked off and grown back, which is also biologically correct to starfish, so that made me feel closer to the ocean, which just the thought of those breezes has a cooling effect, so that was worth it.

 It is also not as big as it looks in the photo, as the hat is very small..You could, however, soak the cloth, squeeze out most of the water from the middle, drape it over your head and let the drips come down the starfish arms for a cooling effect....?

A dumb idea and a new beginning

So, I save things. It is not as bad as hoarding, but it is a problem.

I was not raised during the depression, but many of the people that I have admired the most in my lifetime, and considered my bosom friends (sadly, all gone now) were raised during the depression. Maybe their influence? Maybe it is genetic? Maybe it is just an inventive mind that sees on opportunity in every object for re-purpose.

It is with great effort that I exist in a state of re-training away from my natural tendency to allow the foot of my bed end up looking the way my much admired, beloved and dearly missed Granny's did.

The foot of her bed was a completely personal pile of interesting reading, newspapers, books, letters and clothes that were "in waiting". Clothes that were not quite dirty enough to wash, but not clean enough to wear to town, so waiting to be worn out to the garden. To wash too often would be wasteful. My Granny was very short, so the growing pile did not interfere with her sleeping. When the pile spread around and up the back side of the bed, she would deal with it, but it grew again, and again. She had the most delightful laugh when confronted with it.

My projects do this, spread like this. My spinning and knitting; I start too many, finish too few, have interesting ideas and diversions in the middle. If I lived in an ordinary sized house, there might be room for this "spread". Or if I was not also running the business of knitting anyway in addition to "living" and working my projects in this small of a space, it might not be a problem either.

I offer here for exhibit to examples of things that I should have thrown away right from the start.

Exhibit A)
This very cool and tough banding that came around the bales of shrink wrapped alfalfa that I bought this winter to supplement one of my goats that was frail.

I saved every band off of every bale. I thought it would be so cool woven into a tote bag or something.Stiff and strong... Imagine my chagrin when I discovered this exact same banding made into totebags on display at walmart (spit) pooey. I haven't thrown it out yet, but soon....

Exhibit B)

Our rescue dog is a border collie cross (crossed with something very, very dumb. Bless her heart.)

Anyway, J.B. brushed her daily for a couple of weeks this spring and out came lovely clumps of deep, dark, almost black, soft undercoat. He would peel it off of the brush and toss it willy nilly out in the yard somewhere, wherever he happened to be. Later, I would go around and gather it up, sometimes with dew on it, sometimes I had to fight the kitty for it.

Now really, I ask you, am I seriously ever going to get around to spinning these clumps of dog hair, which when all added up probably is only a spindle full?????

Oh, the new beginning..that will have to wait to the next installment.