From fleece to fiber art: alpaca like the ocean

A few weeks ago a friend of mine called me up. "Will you spin me some yarn for a Mother's Day gift? Any kind of yarn you want," she said (though, I admit, not in these precise words ;)). "I've never seen you make yarn I haven't liked!"

Once the temporary ego-swelling had subsided, of course, I had to make some decisions. My friend (hello, Ms. Friend! ;D) and her mother are both allergic to wool, so anything but wool would work. Well, I have plenty of alpaca fleeces, so off I went to the stash.

I wanted to pick a fiber good for dyeing, since alpaca doesn't naturally come in blue, green, or purple, the colors I hear Ms. Friend's mom uses the most. ;) This, a fleece from Calypso Farm, from a Suri alpaca named Glass Slipper, seemed perfect:


Suri, by the way, is a rare breed of alpaca known for having silky, warm, lustrous, drapey fiber. Only one percent of the alpacas on the planet are of the Suri breed, so "rare" isn't just hype! ;) (Check out Suri Network for more information on Suri alpacas and Suri fiber specifically.)

So the fleece visited the wash tub and the dye pot, and voila! Oceany alpaca!



Anyway, originally I thought I'd do a lightweight yarn that might work for knitting a shawl, as Ms. Friend mentioned something about a lace book for her mom. Now, maybe you know this already because you have lots of friends who are fibers, but fibers have preferences about what makes them look good and behave well. Some look good in little black dresses, some look good in jeans and a t-shirt — well, okay, I'm really talking about fiber preparation here, like combing vs. carding, but I am so not in a jargony technical mood today, so we'll pretend it's kind of like clothing style. ;)

Point is, since I hadn't worked with this particular fleece before and didn't know its preferences, I experimented with different fiber preparations. I tried preparing it on my hand cards, on my drum carder, and with my hand combs, and I tried spinning yarn from all these preparations as well as spinning the fiber straight from the cloud (meaning without doing more than picking it apart with my fingers a bit).

Some of the results I won't share with you *cough*, but I found that while the different preparations weren't radically different in results, the different processes were different amounts of pain in the butt. ;) (Suri alpaca doesn't look fluffy until you try to run it through a Louet Junior Roving Carder, let me tell you ... and then it flies everywhere. I guess I need a drum carder with finer teeth? Or maybe I need to buckle down and get those cotton hand cards I've been drooling over for years.) Anyway, in the end I end I went with the hand combs — even though I think of them as fairly slow, they seem suited to the Suri's straight, silky fibers ... and they don't make the fiber fly everywhere and stick to everything. ;)


Scary fiber equipment, yay!

I even knit up some of the sample yarn to see how it behaved.



That looks pretty decent, huh? But like I said, different fibers have different preferences, and there was just something about this preparation that didn't seem ideal. Sure, it was functional, but the Suri seemed like it wanted to show off a little more, and not be so traditional. Lots of fibers do traditional perfectly well, and the Suri does have an interesting halo to it when spun like this, but ... well, at the rate I was spinning, it also would have taken me forever and ever to finish the whole batch of fiber at that weight. And I had this possibly odd idea that a Mother's Day gift should probably be ready before Mother's Day, plus, I didn't want to think about pricing a yarn that takes 9 whole hours to spin, not even counting the combing and the dyeing and the washing and, and...

So I decided I'd spin it fatter, since the fatter yarn sample I did seemed to show off the Suri's qualities better. Then I thought again: If I spun it fat, because alpaca tends to be fairly heavy and dense compared to wool, I'd end up with a fat, short skein of yarn, an amount that would make it more of an accent yarn than something Ms. Friend's mom would be able to knit a whole item out of. And that'd be silly, wouldn't it? But the singles alone, with its decent yardage, didn't seem appealing enough — again, it was functional, but I wanted to do something special, not just a plain ol' singles.

Then I remembered thread-plying! And so I went into the part of the stash with the cones of vintage weaving yarn, and I pulled out some white thread, and went to town. Ply, ply you fools! The result:


Ta-da! A little over 100 yards of thread-plied art yarn. (Okay, it's a slightly sedate art yarn, but I didn't want to force anything too wacky on someone I can't remember meeting in person, meaning where she would be in range of my ability to sense wackiness tolerance. ;))

Yeah, I may have fallen victim to making things more complicated than they needed to be, by following my own preferences and treating this project like I would have had it been a present for my mom, but that's not such a horrible thing to do when you're given free rein to make whatever yarn you like, right?


And hey, if the recipient hates it, or if she happens to see this blog post and decides she likes it the traditional, takes-two-gazillion-years-to-spin yarn better than the arty yarn, I do have more of this fiber, and more dye. I can always call a redo! It may even take me slightly less than a gazillion years to spin it next time, since then I'll have had the practice of spinning it this time around. ;)

Of course, I do hope she ends up liking it, maybe even making something out of it that eventually shows up in my inbox in photographic form. That's one of the coolest things that can happen to your handmade stuff — seeing it in happy use, in action.

So here's hoping it's well-received. :D Meantime, I'm off again. There's still more of that gigantic scarf to knit...

It's Roc Day again! So have some llama yarn + LED sheep art

This year, once more there will be no traditional Distaff Day fire-setting or water-throwing in the Star & Crossbones studio (crossing fingers as I type this — at least mentally ;)), and I'm not even sure I'm going to make it to the spinning wheel, as I'm knitting some Brigit socks — but I can at least post photos of some yarn I spun earlier this week.

A whole 8+ oz of chunky llama yarn (it's the yarn that's chunky, not the llamas ... as far as I know) spun out of some of the first fiber I bought when I started spinning, which has been sitting in my stash waiting for the right project:


Pretty sure most, if not all, of the fiber is from Bahr Creek Llamas and Fiber Studio. (Half the fiber was actually labeled as such, and if the rest is from elsewhere, I can't think of where it came from.)

And actually, right now the yarn exists as two skeins of two-ply that I don't have photos of yet. Eventually it will be a Capucine hat, hopefully to come with me to Vogue Knitting Live later this month.


If you look closely, you can see that the center of the light-colored ball is beige rather than off-white. I used four different bags of fiber to spin the yarn, but I'm reasonably sure it's all llama. It's definitely camelid and not sheep's wool, at least. ;)


Edited to add: Shout-out to Linda for sending me this kinda hilarious video called "Extreme sheep LED art." Because everyone needs to see sheep wearing Christmas lights and playing Pong. Happy Roc Day. ;)

And the bash was a blast

It's inevitable: Every time I have a craft event coming up, I end up doing it on virtually no sleep. It's not nerves, either; it's cats. I don't know how they know there's going to be an event the next day (sure, I move boxes around before an event, but I move boxes at other times, too), but they invariably go nuts the night before a craft show or other vendy event where I'll need my wits about me. This time the upstairs neighbor's cat even got into the act by climbing up our window screen at six a.m. I guess it's like when I was in high school, and every time an audition was coming up, I'd get sick just in time for it — even when I didn't know there was one coming up, I swear. I'll just have to accept that when I am doing any event as a vendor, I will always be slightly crazier than usual and more than slightly sleep-deprived.

Other than the apparently compulsory lack of sleep, the SaSS Bash went reasonably well. Sales were slow, but socializing was not, and I met a ton of great people, listened to good music, and ate my first pear champagne cupcake and my first red velvet cupcake (courtesy of Frostings, Inc.). As I told the organizers: It was probably the most fun I've ever had making that little money. ;)

We set up in the old 1910 streetcar barn on the river while it was still sunny outside. Have to say, I loved the lighting in there in the afternoon. Wish I could have that lighting all the time for my product photography.


The first mate crafted away on his chain mail stuff while I wrapped up the last of booth setup. Oh, yeah, and took his picture.
The spinning wheel got some exercise.




Yes. This is my lap. Plus fiber.
Then the wheel got tricked out with glow sticks, and let me tell you, I've been wanting to do that for a while, but this is the first nighttime event we've done. Finally.


Is this a little disco-esque? If so, it's appropriate, considering the event was organized by the Disco Dolls.
And with that red fiber up there, I spun an entire bobbin of yarn without even trying (which is officially the first time I've done that at any event). Here's the yarn after I got it home:


I even made a sale on Etsy while I was away, which was pretty amusing (and luckily, I didn't sell something out of the shop that I also sold at the event ... though that would have served me right for forgetting, in my sleep-deprived state, to put the shop on vacation ;)).

So all in all, it was a pretty productive time. Woo to that.

On to the next!

Of wool-washing, yarn-spinning, and reminiscing (TDF Day 1+2 update)

It's been a while since I posted photos of yarn, hasn't it? I must have been saving up for the Tour de Fleece. Here's what I spun yesterday and intend on finishing today (if I can ever meet my self-assigned inkle band weaving requirement for the day ;)):


There's also some Clun Forest wool drip-drying over the bathtub after a nice hot bath, which could get spun this tour — why not? I bought it from Maya at Springtree Road a couple of months ago and have been a lazy bum about washing it until now ... but really, taking a couple of months to wash a fleece is GOOD for me. There were a few that had to wait a couple of years ... and some hidden in boxes around here still need scouring. Maybe I should always buy fleece in 4-oz increments — makes it easy to just throw it into a mesh bag and drop in a wash tub.

Oh, I suppose I could divide it up as soon as it gets here, too, but that seems a little out of character for my current self. My uber-organized, ever-productive teenage self really likes the idea, though. Alas. I ought to have discovered spinning and raw fleeces while I was in college. That would have given me time to get really good at both before I got brave enough be publicly fibery online. ;)

Veering back onto the topic of the Tour de Fleece, I remember last year's TdF, and it seems like forever ago. I was still at the Office Job of Doom, and the tour started exactly a year ago today — on July 4. I came home late, thanks to Independence Day festivities, and I'm pretty sure I got mopey when I got home, since I really don't enjoy feeling pressured to do things that are supposed to be fun. But in the spirit of Craft or Bust (I even used the word "bust" in my blog post from that day ;)), I refused to let my mood and my lack of time beat me: I spun. I spun about two inches of yarn. With my fingers. But still I spun.


This tour, I'm yet again suffering from bouts of grumpitude at the idea that I have to spin every day — which is silly of me, and I intend on ignoring my grumpitude and pressing on this year, too, just like last year. But more notably, last year I was also suffering from Fiber Fright — the fear of "using up" precious, valuable stash. Thinking of it does make me a little edgy, but it's edgy because I don't want to end up with the fiber-artist's equivalent of writer's block again. My long-awaited point: I haven't actually had Fiber Fright this year. Maybe I ought to add "yet," but then again, maybe I ought not. I may have broken my Fiber Fright tendencies ... and that's a really nice thing to discover. Kind of appropriate to discover on Independence Day, too, I guess; it's a sign of my growing independent spirit? No? ;)

Well, happy Fourth again, anyway, and may the Fourth be with you all! ;)

Photo Post: Maybe Merino, Rainbow-Flavored

For your visual enjoyment, the yarn I've been spinning lately:



The fiber is from a grab bag that I won at the Florida Fiber-In's auction last year, so I'm not completely sure of the fiber content, but I'm reasonably sure this is all Merino. I'm planning on Navajo plying it to preserve the color sequence, and then ... I don't know. A hat? A skinny scarf? A mismatched pair of wristwarmers? What do you think?

Surprise flax for the fiber garden

Fiber garden. Does the idea make you drool? It excites me. I love gardening (though I've never had a true place of my own to do it), and I love the fiber arts. Not much is cooler than the marriage of two loves, and a fiber garden would definitely be that.

A few weeks ago I started collecting seeds in anticipation of planting season — although since I live in Florida, our growing season is completely wonky compared to the "normal" one that all advertisements and nearly all magazines seem to target. I'm actually a LOT late on some of the things I'm going to try to grow, but on the other hand, a few years back I tried to grow radishes, and they worked better "out of season" than in, even working with Florida's seasons. What can I say? I'm weird, and it affects my world. ;)

Anyway, I have some lovely Japanese indigo seeds from Light in the Forest Wools and Textiles, and there are some colorgrown cotton bolls with seeds still attached coming my way from Dew Dance Farm. My flax seeds from last year, however, were a casualty of the messy tiny porch situation; the bag fell on the ground near the hose at some point during the winter and a passing bug appears to have chewed its way in, kindly letting in the hose moisture. The seeds may still be viable, but then, maybe not. So I started looking for other sources for flax seeds. Seeds aren't terribly expensive, after all. I sent out a few Etsy messages, and one seller offered to send me a sample of a few seeds to try to sprout, as he sells/uses flax for non-gardening purposes and he wasn't sure whether they would work. I said, "Sure, I'll test a few! Thanks a bunch!" They came today.

And there are more than a few.


An entire package of flax seeds is rather more than I expected as a tester
Suffice it to say "whoa."

So. Big shout-out to The Dream Weaver Shop for their kindness and generosity. Bob at Dream Weaver even sent me a link to a shop that DOES sell flax specifically for growing in case these seeds don't work — what a super-friggin'-nice thing to do. Pop on by their shop and browse a little, 'kay? They've got tea, jewelry and incense resins — and lots of Nice. ;D

Oddly enough, though, their supplier appears to be right in my area:


Hurray, I need a camera that actually does macro!
See where it says "Port Richey, Fl"? That's virtually down the street from me. Small world? ;)

The Tale of the Monster TwitKAL Yarn: How to Spin a Shawl

O. M. G.

That's what I would name this yarn if I were lazy. (...or feeling particularly bizarre. ;))

I have finally finished spinning the TwitKAL yarn, and it turned out to be a monster. This is the biggest skein of yarn I have ever spun. At a guess, I don't need to worry about running out of yardage for the Traveling Woman shawl.

You want to see photos? Yeah? Yeah? Well, I sat there through what, twelve hours of spinning and plying, not even counting the dyeing? You can put up with a few more in-progress photos before you get to see the finished product, too, dangit. ;)

So we left off after the fiber was dyed and dry. The next thing I did was split each color in half (without worrying too hard about making them exactly equal halves) and make mini-sets of three colors — each set of three colors would go on one bobbin, then the two bobbins would get plied together. I actually wanted a bit of overlap between the color changes, to hopefully make for smoother transitions — which is why I didn't bother trying to split each color exactly in half.



Close enough to equal weight for me. Next up: Spinning. Actually, pre-drafting before spinning, to take out any fiber stuck-togetherness (a.k.a. the bit of felting that I probably did when I wasn't paying attention to whether the dyepots were boiling ... ::whistles innocently::).



For those who wonder this kind of thing (I do), the above photos only show half the fiber of a given color. I have waaaayyy too many photos of predrafted fiber now, though, if anyone likes to look at that sort of thing. ;)

And then it was time for lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of spinning. Mini bobbin montage! (Yeah, this doesn't even begin to convey the hours and hours of tiny-yarn spinnage involved.)


At last there were two bobbins, no unspun fiber, and a ghetto lazy kate. The Magical Jumbo Flyer and Bobbin were just over the horizon...


Finally, after more long hours of plying (with occasional cursing when one of the plies broke — not a problem the intrepid wheel+spinner normally have...), one unassuming but gigantic bobbin remained.



Then, this dark and unpromising yarny caterpillar (if you will) split its chrysalis and unfolded its brightly-colored wings. (Ready for it? Ready? Ready??)



TA-DA! And the close-ups!



There it is. Finished. Done. Finito. NO MORE. And it's, like, way, way, WAY more yardage than I need for this shawl. Ha, ha, ha. 4.9 ounces (weirdly, I didn't "lose" any weight, although I normally do with smaller skeins of fatter yarn). 686 yards. Around 18 WPI, a.k.a. sport weight to fingering weight, which is pretty much what I was going for (did I neglect to mention my trusty spinner's comparison card? Maybe it'll show up in a future photo...). Purple, blue, and greeny-blacky.

You may now applaud. Thank you, thank you. Bows all around. Flowers on the stage. The roar of the audience's sincere and deep appreciation. Ahhh.

(And whew. Wait — you mean I have to knit the shawl now? Groooaaan...)

Banishing creative blocks with randomness: generated art yarn win

1. Art yarn: Dragons in the Playground, 2. Art Yarn: Dragons in the Playground, 3. Dragons in the Playground handspun yarn, 4. Dragons in the Playground handspun yarn

That's my latest art yarn. Okay, technically I spun it in Week 1 of Craft or Bust, which is also when I started the draft of this blog post, but CoB this week has been slow and unpicturesque so far, so it all works out.

Here's the story of my art yarn, and how CoB helped me bust in a good way — that is, how it helped me bust an old block: spinning art yarn.

If you've been reading along for long enough (which seems ridiculously unlikely, but some people even still remember me from high school, so anything's possible), you'll know about my First-Art-Yarn Fiasco: I joined an art yarn swap and tried my best to spin a crazy yarn on my drop spindle, based on exactly zero directions, having never actually seen an art yarn in the flesh wool — and pretty much failed miserably, which earned me a lukewarm rating on the swap and broke my art-yarn-spinning heart.

So from that point — although it clashed with my "I can too do it if I try hard enough" attitude — I was semi-secretly afraid to even try to spin art yarn ... What was the point? I sucked, and had been told so by that crappy swap rating. (Swap-bot, I curse you!) It didn't help that I was in a fail-ful relationship at the time — you trying adding failure to failure and see how it makes you feel. ;) Or really, don't; being a failure zombie is no fun.

And being afraid of art yarn was no fun, either, what with that distant echo in my head that said art yarn = fail. But Craft or Bust is about unfail, and in Week 1 I was sick of being a failure, of feeling like a failure, of letting myself fail...!

So I fired up the Art Yarn Generator, courtesy of the Art and Novelty Yarn Spinners' group on Ravelry, and it told me my fortune:



I stash-dived to come up with this:



...and with many a calming breath and some invisible fingers in my ears to help me ignore the You're going to fail voices, I made the art yarn you saw at the top of the post. (Light shone down from above.)

Which just shows how being completely random — a.k.a. letting yourself be free to fail and releasing yourself from old negative attachments — can help break down old blocks. I haven't spun any more art yarn since, but it was surprisingly easy to just let the Art Yarn Generator tell me what to do ... and I get to look creative as a result. ;D

Check out some more randomly-generated art yarn for inspiration at the Art Yarn Generator Flickr pool.

What blocks could you bust with randomness? Any other random generators you'd like to share?

Love and celebrate your fiber on Distaff Day

Today is as close as I know of to a yarn-spinners’ holiday. It’s Roc Day, also known as Distaff Day or St. Distaff’s Day — and it was an odd sort of holiday, once upon a time. That is, it really marked the end of the winter holidays in a lot of European traditions: The day when, after the twelve days of Christmas, people went back to work. Specifically, spinners got back to work making yarn to be woven into all the good stuff we like to use in polite society, like linens, clothing, and tablecloths. (Apparently, women didn’t traditionally spin during the Christmas holidays. Sounds a bit like school holidays today. ;))

The holiday (or un-holiday?) is named after the distaff used to hold fiber near the spinning wheel, a.k.a. the rock, or apparently roc — it’s not just a mythical creature any more! Traditional activities included plowmen setting fire to the unspun flax fiber — how considerate ;) — and women throwing buckets of water at said plowmen as a convenient way of putting out the fire. Funny. (And darn cold, since most of Europe at this time of year isn’t exactly balmy.)

No fire-setting or water-throwing for me today, but in honor of Distaff Day, I’m doing a little more of that window shopping I love so much. (Anyone else notice that “window shopping” completely translates to computers? As in, “Let me open a new window and visit Etsy?") And of course I’ll be sitting down at the spinning wheel, as soon as I can make up my mind which of my fluffies look the most like they want to be transformed into yummy yarn.

There's also a Roc Day celebration at Heritage Village this weekend. I tried to find the spinners there last year, but the darn place is big and fascinating and I got up late … so I missed the spinning wheels and the fiber. Hopefully the spinning gods (or the nonexistent St. Distaff) will smile on me this year.

Do you have a Roc Day tradition? Post comments, send pictures! Or start a new tradition! How did you spend your Roc Day?

Sources:

Roc Day PDF, Apple Leef Farms
Distaff Day entry, Wikipedia

In a buying mood

So this may not be the best time to buy, as I just left my office job and could very well be living off savings in a few weeks, but as fate will have it, people keep posting used stuff on Ravelry that just happens to be exactly what I've wanted for years. One way to interpret this would be that something is trying to tempt me to spend all my money so that I fall on my face and have to get another "normal" job to pay the bills.

Another way to take this is that the universe is conveniently providing me with a way to equip my fiber arts studio while I actually have the money.

Equip it, then, I shall.

On the way to me this week is the loom I suspected I'd want when I heard about it, wanted more when I saw it, and have continued to want as I researched it: The Kromski Harp. The gigantic one. 32" weaving width, I dream of thee ... and just imagine the ridiculousness of double-weaving a 64" width! I could weave a ball gown on this thing. If it's compatible with my little half-Asian 5'maybe1" body.

Then there are the used spool rack and blending hackle up for sale. The first is mine unless something goes wrong — cackle; as far as the second, I haven't decided yet. There's a woodworker on Etsy who makes lovely blending hackles that come with clamps and everything, and I do feel the need to encourage people who make lovely things to keep making them. Hmm.

Oops — as I type about buying stuff, my Phat Fiber box has arrived. (What? Me? In a buying mood?) This is my first Phat Fiber box, so I got a mixed box of spinning fiber and yarn:



There are even more yarn and fiber on the way from Blonde Chicken Boutique — and more to come after that as I stock up on recycled yarn for upcoming holiday craft shows.

And now I'm up against one of those things you hear small business owners talk about. It would be extremely satisfying to sit here and continue to abstractly ponder fiber and to browse the endless acquirable fiber stash of the Internets while planning product lines, but I have two dozen other things to do. I need to buy a vendor tent for the aforementioned craft shows. I need to order more business cards, and maybe some postcards or stickers. I need to create more product, and (oy!) do Web site design homework for my online class, which will lead to my building the new starncrossbones.com. A ton of things to do, and I just want to play with fluffies and take photos.

The alternate temptation is to absolutely refuse to let myself even consider playing with fluffies and taking photos, which would be multiply counterproductive; I need to be creative and happy at the same time as I get all my work done. Even the crap I don't want to do right now, that needs to be done right now.

Remember, me: This is still better than sitting in a box and unwillingly trying very hard to think like someone other than yourself for eight hours. (Willingly trying for hours to think like someone other than yourself is called "writing," which I will also be doing sometime soon. But that's a tangent for another day. ;))

Real-World Crafting

A lesson for today: Living, crafting and creating do not occur in a vacuum.

Intellectually, I've always known that — but there have been times when not having a clean enough work space has kept me from feeling inspired, and I know I'm not the only one who has that problem. But something must be different right now.

Today, I noticed the craft room smelled a little odd. Thinking about it, I realized it had the day before, too, but I had chalked it up to the changing smells that naturally invade rooms right by a kitchen, and by a bathroom that serves both humans and kitties. Some rather unappealing smells occasionally seep into the room, but even the strongest usually go away after a day or two, and they don't stick to my crafting things, so I don't worry about it too much. So I left the door open to air out the room.

Later, I noticed a little damp spot on the knee of my pants. I'd climbed on the kitchen counter earlier to get a bowl from a top shelf ... but the counter wasn't wet. I'd also knelt on the floor of the craft room earlier to take a photo of some new spinning batts. And yes, indeed. The craft room carpet was damp. Had the cats gotten in? No; the room smelled odd, but it would have been more obvious if the kitties had left me a note.

Then I remembered that the bath tub has a leak. Two days ago, the boyfriend had thought it was only leaking into the area between the tub and the wall, but I'd noticed it leaking out the side of the tub.

And the bath tub is on the other side of the craft room closet.

...And yes, indeed. The craft room carpet was damp all the way from the closet to the front of the sewing table.

Now, this isn't the newest condo. It's had problems before. We're currently borrowing someone's backup air conditioning floor unit because our central air stopped cooling anything in October, and while it was repairable as of then, supposedly it won't be for much longer because the parts are getting hard to find. Since we don't have several thousand dollars to replace both the inside and the outside unit, we were air-conditioning-less until B's father rescued us with his borrowed floor unit. (For reference, this is all happening in the amazingly humid and hot land of Florida, home of happy mold spores and ants that ignore traps.)

Another example: Last year, the closet shelves tried to fall on me one morning before work because the upstairs condo had a leaky bath tub. Their leak meant our drywall had gotten not so dry, and when that happens, drywall screws don't like to continue supporting heavy shelving. So we ripped out and replaced the drywall in the closet AND the bathroom and, in fact, we still need to re-tile that shower.

So. This condo has had its share of quirks. Another one isn't unexpected. But at times, fixing this sort of quirk has absorbed all my creative energy, leaving me wholly focused on cleaning up at the expense of creating.

This time, though, I checked to make sure nothing was visibly falling down, cracked the closet door to make sure the humidity could escape, made a mental note not to take any more baths until we fix the leak, and continued thinking about spinning yarn. I even took a photograph of some batts I've had stashed for a while, that I was considering resurrecting:


And even though there were five (@#$*!) ants in the kitchen today, after several (extremely welcome) weeks without any, I didn't get discouraged. I just moved one of the magical liquid ant baits that we discovered the ants don't ignore, and went back to putting together the EtsyFEST catalog index.

This seems to part of my brain to verge perilously on apathy about running a shoddy ship, but on reflection, it's a relief not to feel like I need a sterile environment in order to create. Because really, there's no such thing as an utterly sterile living environment. (Some people's houses come off as sterile, but that's a different monster.) There will always be crumbs. There will always be bugs. There will always be dust. I can live in denial about it, and freak out when I get proved wrong ... or I can remember that I'm part of a larger ecosystem, and that nothing I buy, no matter how tightly sealed its plastic wrapping, was created, inspected and delivered by spotless, germ-free robots directly to the point where I encountered and acquired it.

Things are dirty. Things are germy. Things will get dirty. Things will need cleaning.

And the aim isn't to fixate on completely avoiding the dirt. The aim is to minimize the negative impact of life-generated dirt on creating beautiful things — including memories — and to be able to efficiently clean up a mess when it inevitably happens, without letting it keep me from doing things that make me happy.

In celebration of living with and through the mess, I present this lovely photodump of things I have created, and things I have bought from other creative people, since my last blog post here. Ta-da!

Cotton Candy batt from Spazzy Yarns


Blue alpaca/wool yarn spun from Holly Birch Fibers


Organic yarn spun from a SpinSpanSpun on Etsy batt


Purple Schmurple handspun bought from Spazzy Yarns


Beaches handspun bought from Simply Twisted on Etsy


Sea and Sand handspun bought from Spazzy Yarns


Mishmash yarn, from a SpinSpanSpun organic batt


Proud Peacock yarn, spun from Gale's Art Fiber


More organic yarn spun from a SpinSpanSpun batt


Cheers.

Tour de Fleece, Day 11?

This past weekend in the Tour de Fleece I fell out of the Peloton and into the Lantern Rouge, the team for people who can't spin every day. I thought it might happen — it was even likely — but I hoped I'd be able to overcome that through sheer momentum. I spun some more of the Colonial on the drop spindle on Friday, but Saturday I got waylaid by chores, errands, a birthday celebration, and most of all, a melodramatic boyfriend who not only ate Saturday night, but also sucked up most of Sunday and my energy for that day, too. Alas. The power of angsty significant others is greater than the power of the spinning wheel ... at least in the short run.

Today, though, I got back on the wheel and spun some more of the moorit Corriedale. No photos; it looks like yet more brown yarn on a bobbin at the moment.

The first Cricket loom scarf did get worked on over the weekend — finished, in fact. I completed the weaving part and took it off the loom on Sunday to start twisting the fringe, then finished the fringe yesterday and washed the scarf. Today, it's dry, so it's officially done. Cheers.

And my organic batts from SpinSpanSpun arrived last week. Motivators for the remaining portion of the Tour de Fleece?

Tour de Fleece, Day 6; and my new Cricket loom!

My Cricket is finally HERE!

Warping it was way, way easier than warping the cheap but bigger rigid heddle I bought a while ago. Meridith of SweetKnits even sent me some nicely-matching yarn to replace the handspun she was going to send along originally (it was an angora blend, so I had to turn it down), and it's on the loom right now. I thought it would take me at least an hour to warp this thing, since it took an appallingly long time (four or more hours?) to warp the monster rigid heddle even with Brian's help ... but I think this took me way less than an hour. Yay, Schacht, for sending good warping directions!

I am, alas, too lazy to take a good photo of the loom itself right now, but here's what's on it at the moment:



And — all right — if I must share my crappy first photo of the Cricket, here it is:



The Cricket and I were bonding, and I didn't want to leave it to spin for Tour de Fleece, but Le Tour is Le Tour. Somehow, using my drop spindle seemed like it would be less intensive than sitting at the wheel, so my poor, abandoned possibly-Greensleeves spins again:



If I remember correctly, that's some Colonial wool I got from Uncommon Threads.

And in case anyone was wondering, last night's test knitting was cursed. First, I couldn't find the pattern, even though I thought I had specifically put it into the bag with the knitting so I wouldn't lose it — it turned out that I had put a different piece of paper in there, that I just thought was the pattern. Sigh. Then when I tried to print a new copy of the pattern, the printer jammed about four times. There must be a tiny piece of paper stuck in there that I won't be able to get out without taking the thing apart. Sigh, I say, again. Then I had to go to bed, since there's still that pesky office job thing going on. The test knitting was just not fated for success yesterday.

Still, that and today's unhinged day at work set me up to receive the Cricket loom tonight, and my first Super-Awesome Bag of Crap swap from the Ravelry Spin or Dye Swapping group:



Those little balls of pencil roving are so very soft, and the chocolates are so very good (and I'm pretty picky about chocolate) ... This is a most awesome bag of crap. It was almost worth having a crappy day to get that and the loom and my new Harmony needles and blocking boards from Knit Picks all on the same day.

Oh. And. I gave in and bought some books from Interweave's Hurt Book Sale. I should really stop buying random things ... but ... but...

But they're useful...?