(mis)adventures of spindlerose

Sad day

I am flying to Wisconsin early tomorrow morning to say good bye to Grandma. She died this afternoon. I will miss her, but remember her every time I pick up my knitting needles.

I look forward to spending time with my family remembering her and Grandpa.

Random Wednesday with sniffles

Roadside Buddha, Maui, May 2009

If that's not random, I don't know what is.

I have spent the week at home with tea, Kleenex, soup, and occasional kitty snuggles. I am on the mend and plan venture to Knit Happens tonight for some knitting and socializing. Between now and then, I need to finish preparing to teach a class tomorrow morning and drink more tea.

Making Spinners

I finished teaching my first session of Spinning 101 at Fibre Space yesterday. There are four new spinners in the world this week because I taught them. I also taught 3 members of the Fibre Space staff to spin. I learned quite a bit during the class that will help make the next two sessions better. In looking for spindle and fiber prep examples for show and tell, I unearthed all kinds of treasures buried in my stash.

To wrap up the 3 session class, I hauled both wheels and the drum carder to the shop (in the rain, no less) so that my students and my friends could play. One friend had a blast blending fake cashmere top with a little bit of firestar and Colonial Top. She then spun it up on a spindle and christened the yarn Alaska Princess.

I've also reacquainted myself with both the Schact and the Joy in the past couple of weeks. Over the past two Saturdays, I spun merino and sea silk singles for yarn for a friend. An amazing pencil roving showed up at Fiber Space, and I desperately wanted to spin some. The recent stash dive (and plans for Rhinebeck in a few weeks) kept me from buying any for myself. I offered to make yarn for Beth if she bought the fiber. I had every intention of plying today, but laundry, cooking for D, making a pass through the closet, and finishing a pair of socks won.

It's time to finish up that last bit of laundry and get to sleep. I'll try to be less of a stranger to the blog for the rest of 2009.

Tour de Fleece Wrap Up

I did spin every day for the first two weeks of the Tour de Fleece. Then work got crazy, I finally decided to read the last 4 Harry Potter books, and my hands gave out (probably from holding the heavy books). I am happy with the amount of spinning I accomplished in small bits of time over two weeks. I spun two more balls of the finewool fleece and spun up some of the Blue Moon Fiber Arts BFL roving I bought at Sock Camp in March. I still have to ply the finewool left to ply. Inertia keeps winning: why pull out a spinning wheel when I can grab the sock out of the knitting bag right next to where I am sitting.

In the end, I decided that life is too short to process the rest of the finewool fleece by hand. I'm down to the last small bin of washed wool, and I think it is all leg wool. The staple is shorter, the tips are yuckier, and there is lots more VM (vegetable matter) and other crud in the wool. When the weather cools down a bit, I plan to set up the drum carder on the deck and send the last bit through the carder. If it doesn't disintegrate, I'll spin it up, if it does, I'll toss it.

As soon as I overcome the spinning wheel inertia, this project will be finished. I think I need to spin something fun and colorful next. Then I'll tackle another natural colored fleece.

SpindleRose Spins Again

Tour de Fleece progress so far: 1.4 ounces of singles spun in two 45 minute sessions and enough rolags to keep me spinning at that rate for a few more days. I am down to my last storage bin of this fleece. The end of it is actually in sight.

Tour de Fleece

After several years cheering my friends from the sidelines, I decided to participate in the fun this year. I joined Team Rookie, Team Spindle, and Team Spin for Peace. My only goal is to spin for at least 30 minutes every day including any days that I am traveling (I have one trip planned for July so far). Since I want to finish spinning the fleece I have been hand processing, I expect to spend at least 30 minutes prepping wool for spinning every day, too.

The fleece is from Elihu Farm in upstate New York. I bought it at the Massachusetts Sheep and Wool Festival in 2004. I enjoy spindle spinning and hand carding, it is the picking and wheel plying that challenge me. The fleece is a bit tippy and sometimes fragile, so I'm pulling of the tips and opening the locks by hand to prep them for carding. In order to end up with nice big skeins, I have been winding 3 or 4 spindle cops onto a nostepinde and wheel plying 2 of those balls. Today, I plyed the 4 balls of singles I've spun in the past year or so and made enough rolags for about 2 hours of spinning.

L to R:Washed locks, rolags, 200 grams of yarn. As always click for big.

This is a good start to my rookie Tour. Tomorrow I plan to spin a bit and try to finish prepping the current bin of locks. I'll also spend most of the morning on the sofa with a sock watching the Wimbledon Gentlemen's Final.

Tonight D and I are headed into the District to watch the fireworks from the roof of his building. We'll be about three blocks north of the center of the Reflecting Pool. I saw the fireworks crew setting up on Wednesday while visiting monuments with my sister's family.

Garden fun

So, we rent our townhouse. Everyone else on our block owns theirs and spend a lot of time cultivating their postage stamp gardens. Last summer, ours stuck out like an uncultivated black thumb. I am unwilling to invest in prettier shrubs or perennials for a garden I will leave soon. I travel far too much to cultivate anything that requires more effort than plant and ignore. Back in March, I took shameful advantage of Mom's visit and put her to work helping me weed, plant a few pansies, and mulch our tiny garden. Then it rained a lot in April and May and the pansies exploded.

I am pleased with the results. Our garden is still under-cultivated relative to the neighbors, but it no longer looks so out of place.

How many socks did SpindleRose knit while on vacation?

So, I have been home for over a month, and I never did post the vacation sock contest results. Work and visitors took over for most of June. I did not travel much for a change, I just spent so much time attached to my computer during the workday that I had no desire to fire it up at night. Then we had visitors in and out for the past two weeks—which also required a fair amount of preparatory cleaning and organizing since kids slept in the wool room. First, my college friends Rachel and Hilary and their three boys visited for a long weekend. Then, my sister and her family arrived for a week. I had lots of fun entertaining all those kids, but I have no idea how their parents can do it all day every day. Just a few days wore D and me out.

To answer the big question, I knit about 1/2 of one sock on vacation. I also added a few inches to the summer shell while we shuttled across central Maui getting from our home base at Kanapali to fun activities. Amy was right—there is just too much fun stuff to do in Hawaii to spend time knitting. I knew that, but for some reason I thought I would spend more time knitting at the beach and pool and less time reading. I think I read about 10 novels on the trip (close to one a day on the days we lazed around). The random number generator picked 1 and 8, so the first and last entrants Susan and Angela win.

Amy wins her choice of blue or pink silk yarn from Japan—I'm keeping the other color. Susan and Angela both win a lovely little change purse (also from Japan) that is perfect for storing knitting notions. I found both the yarn and the purses at Yarn & Friends in Honolulu.

Thanks to everyone for commenting and being patient while I completely ignored the blog during June. And here's a new contest for July: I'm closing in on 300 comments. The 300th commenter will win a prize from my bin of handspun yarn.

Home again

I have over 300 photos from vacation to review, organize, and post to Flickr. I also have a bunch of notes and travel recommendations for anyone else headed to Hawaii. What I have not had is time.

We were home for less than 12 hours when one of my account managers asked me to join him for a 2 day visit to North Carolina this week. We had a lot of good meetings, so the 10 hours I spent in the car over Wednesday and Thursday was worth it, but being home is nice too. Barring another surprise trip, I'm home until June 16. I really do love my job, but the travel for the past 6 months or so has been ridiculous.

Check back this weekend for Hawaii contest prizes and more pictures of paradise. Now I've got to get back to work.

Rosemary is too busy relaxing to post

But here's a picture of Upper Waikani Falls to make up for the lack of anything. D included for scale.