03.26.07
Posted in knitting at 7:58 pm by wendy
In the hustle and bustle of the new year, or the end of the old year, I really can’t remember, I reorganised the shop and stash room and wrote down all of the Unfinished Objects, all the projects that needed a lil sumpin’ sumpin’ to be done.
Of course, I can’t find it.
But here’s something off the top of my head:
That’s ten, I know there are more but those are the ones I could think of.
Cash Iroha Bottoms up sweater
I started this in February, I just needed something quick and easy that I could do with my hands, no need to think, just knitting round after round of stockinette.
I don’t think it helped with missing my mom, with the flood of thoughts (how could it be worse? I don’t want to know) but it was something. Sorry, no inspirational “knitting saved me” story, but one about compulsion, perhaps…
I’ve done the ribbing for the bottom, ribbing at the neck, and now I’m on the first sleeve.
Cross your fingers I don’t run out of main color.I did the body in one fell swoop (relatively) but set it down and left it pretty much untouched, I knew I had more MC but couldn’t find it so I put it down and was knitting on the little sweater for Sophie, the linen sweater, working.
We had a chunk of the latter part of February, Nick and I, where we went between work, sleep, and Mom’s place to pack and move and sort and clean nonstop, where it was carried around but probably not touched, where we were perpetually exhausted but relatively focused on what had to be done.
Thank goodness for rental storage units, garages, a voracious culture of Coronado alley/trash pickers, and most of all: Grammy.
Stuff that was in the gray zone, or we knew it couldn’t go but it had to be out, Grammy let us put it in her garage. By the end of the next week, she could park her car in her garage again, but until you’ve had to do this, you’ll have no idea what this means and how much it helps.
Um, digression. Anyway, see how knitting encapsulates memories? Yeah, well, I’ll still wear the sweater. I hope.
I hope to finish this in this month.
BiColor Cable Cardigan
All this needs now is to sew on the buttons and a hell of a lot of easin’ in of the sleeve caps. I double checked row & stitch gauge and they are on pattern, so I’m not sure what’s up. But (if I’m remembering rightly) nearly two inches of easing in is a lot of easing in.
But really, what’s that? Maybe a half hour’s work? So an hour for me and there’s a project done. So, another goal for March. What’s left of March anyway.
I think I’ll leave the other items for another day, another post. It’s not terribly interesting to write (nor read) about stuff that isn’t happening, isn’t finished.
Good times, good times, scraps from memory lane:
Now that is one happy little kid.
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03.21.07
Posted in entertainment, skype at 9:06 am by wendy
The way I type, I almost always spell my name Wnedy when signing off. Just a useless little fact for you.
I logged into the Skype thing last night for about ten minutes, maybe halfway through. I was the only one on and I gather there were some problems logging on. Given that I was almost dreading someone being logged on (I’m not much of a phone talker and the sound quality last time was pretty bad, I was imagining that multiplied by however many participants) I think I won’t set that bad boy to repeat. Maybe if Skype makes it easier, maybe if the sound quality improves, maybe if I suddenly become a phone chatter.
I’m just posting to share this:
Overheard in New York
I don’t care if they’re true or not (and some items are just so unbelievable, but maybe I have more faith in humans than I think) I find the tidbits very diverting.
Also, I wanted to share a pic of Crivens’ armpit pin feathers.
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03.20.07
Posted in Shop Updates at 12:55 pm by wendy
Hey there, here’s the addy if anyone wants to give it a shot.
Click here.
I’m not sure when I’ll be able to check in, but I hope it’s fun. 
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03.18.07
Posted in knitting at 11:42 pm by wendy
even if it’s just a little something.
The back: 
It’s the “Adorable Chenille Cardigan” from
Natural Knits, but done in Plymouth Yarns
Boku. It’s 95% wool, 5% silk, aimed I think to replace Noro at a slightly lower price.
I enjoyed knitting with it–I love striping yarns, I can’t help it–and I even used it for two started and kiboshed design projects before this one. (I was dreaming of projects that didn’t match the yarn) When I tried to seam the project though, the yarn fell apart.
This made me worry about the buttons. In case you didn’t know, inside my mind, babies are inhumanly strong when it comes to ripping off chokeable sized items, so I bought a ribbon to sew on the back of the left edging.
I forgot to take a picture, but trust me, I’m not winning any awards for handsewing any time. Ever. Anyway, I sewed the buttons onto this ribbon through the yarn with upholstery thread, so if Sophie manages to rip it off, I have a fiver on her to win the babyOlympics.
I picked the buttons up nearly 2 years ago from Lakeside Knits. They were naturally dyed, handcarved, and green and brown so of course I thought of Heidi. But I stashed them away and kept forgetting to give them to her (cleaning out my Mom’s apt, wow, we are definitely mother and daughter) and now here they are finally on a sweater for her daughter.
I have two more buttons, so they’ll end up on something…maybe a Coraline-creepy-style teddy bear for her…just kidding.
And this goes out to Terri:
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03.14.07
Posted in clippings, dogs, knitting, skype, spinning at 8:22 am by wendy
I forgot to set the Skypecast to repeat, I forgot about it completely until about 7 o’clock tonight; this last week has got completely away from me. Thankfully, I’ve been keeping a dayplanner lately and so I can look back and see that, yeah, I did do stuff even if it’s all a big ocean of vague with the odd islands of memory now.
Here’s how lame I am though, I can’t figure out a quick way to grab everybody’s e-mails from the comments who said they were interested in participating, so I set up an announcement list –dreamhost.com’s webpanel makes that about a minute’s work v. going through all the comments and cutting and pasting people’s addresses and then accidentally closing the window and then starting all over and…anyway, if you want to give the Skype SnB thing a try next week, please hit this thing up:
Hopefully that’ll work.Needless to say, the only mail you’ll get from that is the confirmation e-mail and the actual announcements themselves with the link to go to to join the Skypecast, no organ enlargement spam or hot stock tips from this direction, I promise.Also, if anyone savvier with Skype knows how to get a permanent link for the SnB so I don’t have to bother with setting it to repeat and send out e-mails, please give me a shout.
Spinning and Knitting
I finally got a chance to get to Stick and Stone Fiberarts in Van Nuys. We were up in Riverside for a wedding and drove down to check it out and meet up with a fun couple we met in Guanajuato who live in the L.A. area.It’s a great little shop, with a nice selection of fibers out and fondle-able, including Chasing Rainbows and unprepared camel down. So much beautiful stuff, including this lovely Kundert spindle.
I’d spun on one briefly before–MJ’s–and the lines of it stuck in my head. It’s light and pretty and spins purty durn good. When I got it home I started spinning up some of the 80s merino/tencel blend I’d painted, but I still need to ply it. Heather helped me out pulling the yarn off at the Whistlestop (it all fell off in a wad) to make a skein and I’ll eventually get to it.
Oh my gosh. I’m watching showtime and they just showed an ad for This American Life, premiering March 22nd. And they have a freaking series for Henry VIII. I am so mad that Mom is gone, she would have got such a kick out of those.
So I traveled for 21 days and this is all the knitting I have to show for it. My excuses:
- linen + mistake rib + US 1 & 3s = sloOooooOOOoow going
- mostly I can do it by feel, no problem, but when the scenery is really interesting / the road is really curvy / I was in class / walking (I can knit and walk, yes, and sometimes I did, but most times I’d rather enjoy the moment wholly for the wonderful experience it was)
So, by the end of our expected month long vacation, I expected to have a sweater to wear on the plane ride home. Instead, we came home early because the worst possible thing we never expected happened, although I wouldn’t have made the finished sweater goal anyway. For some reason, I couldn’t give much of a crap about that.
I still have the second sleeve on the needles and I knit on it when I just NEED something to knit, but I’ve been knitting on more fun, worsted weight and unphotographed things lately.
More spinning
Pin drafted pencil roving moorit merino and angora blend fiber, (unknown percentages) 4 oz. I bought this from Flying Colors Ranch (Robin Snyder) way back when the Cuyamaca Water Gardens had that very small fiber fest.
a more attractive picture of this fun fiber
I’ve been trying to spin with more twist so that when I ply I can have a greater angle of twist.
Usually my singles are really low twist and my plied yarns, while soft and lofty and squishy, aren’t tightly plied. But I’ve come to the conclusion that I live a high abrasion lifestyle, so more twist is needed. Plus, with this stuff being so fine, it turned out great. Of course it’s angora blend so it’ll poof out no matter what.
Crivvie Interlude
I hope Crivvie had half as much fun here when Mom was staying here with the dogs, Crivvie’s goofiness is happy-making.
More Spinning
I finally got around to busting out the scale, the lazy kate, and the ball winder and dividing the remaining 80s merino I’d dyed up so long ago.
My desk is such a mess. I’ll edit all these later with yarn measurements & so on; I’ve misplaced the original scraps of paper I wrote them down on.
I ended up with a fair amount of single leftover so I ran it through to add more twist, then plied it with itself with a lot of twist, then plied it again in the opposite direction to make a cabled yarn I feel pretty “meh” about.
There’s not much of it so it’ll be the stripe of something.
It’s a good exercise though for me with plying: to practice focus, and to be watchful of the effects. It’s pretty hard darn near impossible to make a good looking cabled yarn if the single isn’t consistently spun, but since I had spun this to be a three ply and I like a little variation in my singles (why spend time handspinning if it’s going to look machine spun?) my variations in thickness and twist weren’t a good base for a cabled yarn.
I like to practice anyway, by adapting the amount of twist in the plying process to each section–that’s where the focus comes in. In some parts you can see I got it all right, in others I needed more twist.
Here’s a favorite family photo:
It’s not the greatest scan, but in it you can see my Grandmother, my brother (two years old[?] at the time [he’s eleven years my senior]), my Aunt Dian, my Uncle Deke sporting the pimpin’est pair of trousers, my Mom, and my Dad, who was apparently anxious to return to his yachting cocktail party when this pic was snapped.
Is fashion sense (or lack therof) genetic?
Happy Wednesday, here’s an earworm for ya.
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03.09.07
Posted in clippings, entertainment at 10:10 am by wendy
Thank goodness that didn’t happen. ;-p
Thank you to
Lori and
Nancy and Yoli for logging into the Skypecast. I will set it up to repeat, but I’m not sure it’s for me. At times the sound quality was terrible and there was a delay, so talking had kind of an awkward & stilted element from not wanting to step all over each other.
But Lori sounded just like she sounds like in my head, so that was cool!
Anyway, I’ll have it up next week and will be logged on, so we’ll see. It’s really not the same and chatting might be better, we’ll see how it goes next week. Plus no reason we can’t have both, although I haven’t been online much at all lately, so setting up blog widgets for chat and such are off in that nebulous future…
I have been spinning and knitting, I’ve even taken pictures of some of it all, but danged if I can find them on my hard drive.
I will find them, and I’ll have a mondo-fiber catchup post, but right now everything is still everywhere.
sooooperdiscombobulated.
Check this out:
I’m not sure if this is particular to the military or my mother as military dependent, but I love the idea of being able to have your baby with you in a passport photo.
And now for something completely different:
I was alerted by KnitSteph to the fabulous freaky kitsch of this New Zealand horror humor:
There are 40 million sheep in New Zealand
AND THEY’RE PISSED OFF!
Happy Friday!
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03.06.07
Posted in entertainment at 6:28 pm by wendy
Hey ever-buddy! I must have screwed up the time, I logged in to the Skypecast and it showed as starting an hour ago. D’oh.
So if’n you still want to get together and Skype and Knit/Spin and Kvetch, click here.
Just go below that secure link box and click the blue words: “Join This Skypecast.”
Wheeeee! See you/hear you there! (hopefully, I nearly forgot)
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03.04.07
Posted in clippings, entertainment at 8:32 pm by wendy
;-P
a clipping found in my Mom’s stuff, although I think it was probably sent to my grandmother by her mother.
And now for something completely different:
…botfly larvae extraction from back, yum!
(what’s wrong with me that I’m just as grossed out by the filthy fingernails and cuticles of the people involved?)
And this pdf file is a case report of botfly larvae embedded in the tip of a man’s staff o’ life. With a pic of it. Poor guy. (But still, better a botfly larvae than a sex disease as the docs originally thought, hope it was a wake up call for him to change his habits.)
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