04.25.08
Posted in travel at 8:47 pm by wendy
jiggety-jig, Libélula’s a bossy little pig!
Seattle was fun! Vancouver was fun! (but brief. I got homesick. not sure when I became that girl, but there ya go)
I’ve got some pictures up on a flickr set entitled, oh so creatively “Seattle.” Looking through it, I could have called it “Things Which Look Like Genitals and Some Canadians.”
We hit the Space Needle, the Underground Tour, and the Aquarium. We ate, we drank, we browsed shops which catered to a small but apparently well-heeled market, we slept, I forgot stuff pretty much everywhere I went, Ande made out with a bitch of a yarn store employee, we walked a lot, and then we drove north to Canada!
Canada was everything I dreamed and more.
I did learn though, that while Canadians may be famous for politeness and cute police, they are as big a bunch of dorks in traffic as any southern Californian/ San Franciscan. At least, that was my experience in Vancouver on the 99 during the lunch rush hour. Hey Canada! Y’all need more left turn lanes and signals, apparently, because one lane of traffic gets stopped dead while they wait to turn and the other lane goes whizzing by…and even when stopped or slowing down for a light you can’t get over to the active lane because
a) no one will let you in
b) you can’t see far enough back to judge a traffic gap to safely get over because there’s an old lady in a giant SUV on your @ss. I spent about fifteen minutes sitting on the 99 at Prince Edward Ave. Maybe three cars got to turn left, against the light. It felt like being in L.A., especially since the only reason I’m not still sitting there is ‘cuz I gave up the courteous safe driving thing and drove like I was in T.J. (i.e. crank the wheel, hit the gas, and put your fate in the hands of the Blesséd Virgin) like everybody else.
Also, Canada, what’s with the randomly flashing lights? I get that the flashing yellow let’s you know it is going to turn red, but some of the lights started solid green, then flashed. Some started flashing, then turned solid, and some were solid all the time. It’s a little weird.
It was a long drive home because of the Vancouver traffic and then Seattle traffic, but I broke it up by checking out the Weaving Works on my way. Awesome shop. Raw fleece, prepared top, local yarns, huge selection of books, nice range of classes. That and Stitch were my favorites. Stitch had a great class list for sewing and knitting a great selection of ribbons and zippers and fabrics.
I look forward to going back after I’ve burned through a lot more of my fiber and fabric stash…
As far as creative stuff since I’ve come home, not much. I’m tagging and bagging for a craft fair tomorrow. Shouldn’t be too busy, but it’ll be good practice.
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04.19.08
Posted in travel, woohoo! at 10:38 pm by wendy
I’ll be heading up to Seattle at the crack of the a.m., barring any weather conditions, so if you need me, call the cell. 
I’ve never been to Seattle before; I’ll be meeting Ande and Terri on Monday and we’ll be checking out the sights and local yarn shops, then up to Vancouver! As far as I know, I’ve also never been in Canada before, so this is all going to be one big adventure.
But I won’t be back until the 24th, and I’m going no e-mail (or going to try to) so…really, if it’s important, call the cell.
In other news, I still suck at sewing. And I’ve discovered that it is possible here to walk into the emergency room, receive treatment, be discharged, get a prescription from the Rite Aid and be back home all within one hour. I also had to go to the DMV a couple weeks ago and was out the door again within maybe five minutes. Hooray for Yreka!
I love it here.
I also finally got a drum carder; a Louet Jr. which will be part of the rental equipment retinue. I’ve only made one batt so far, but it was fun and very random. More pictures and info if you click the pic.
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06.29.07
Posted in travel at 10:57 pm by wendy
Safe and sound.
Speaking of safe and sound (well, relatively) Digit is back! Welcome home miracle cat! I love how he looks like Greebo in this top picture.
I had a fantastic time in Portland and Eugene.
I shopped like I don’t think I have ever shopped before. I’d say my plastic is sore, but I just checked the card balance, and wow. Less than I thought. I’m going to have to go through my bag of receipts and make sure everyone has gone through–it seemed like a lot of people had a Paypal virtual terminal type thing going on, most needed the street number, card verification number, phone number and zip code, others needed the street name & city too. As a merchant, I looked at that and thought, ‘holy cow, I can’t see people having the patience for that at a show or faire!” but as a customer, I was like, “Whee! Cool stuff! Who cares?” It takes a second to write it all down, I didn’t have a problem with it and didn’t see anyone else fussing about it either. I’d be curious to hear what you all think about it.
Anyway, the spindle above was purchased direct from
Spindlewood. Quite a few vendors there had them, in the woods you can see on their page, but this manzanita burl square whorl with wenge shaft just grabbed me with its gradation of color. I love manzanita and its little dried apple-tasting berries, it’s a big feature of local ramblings. I liked talking to him and his wife, it’s my favorite thing about these kind of markets this opportunity to meet the people who produce the stuff we love, and the people behind the online shopping.And of course, one of the best things about leaving is coming home. Packages come…like this one from
Dawn of the
Knitter’s Coffee Swap, yum. (click on it to go to its flickr pic and see notes)
And the best thing ever about coming home…
I have a lot more about BSG and the trip, but until then, this picture sums it up.
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02.22.07
Posted in stupefied, travel at 11:59 pm by wendy
Reason # 1001 I miss my mother
she sent this to The Weasel (Libélula) when she went to New Zealand:
Silly mommy, I miss you.
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01.14.07
Posted in travel at 7:44 pm by wendy
Hola again from Mexico–I don´t have a ton of time at this internet cafe, but we´ve joined our tour (first day) and I finally found a pc in Tulum´s crucero that doesn´t completely freak out when the camera plugs in so here goes…
The view from the funicular of Guanajuato city´s historic center:
Sweet, sweet, sweet coffee made with an actual machine (not nescafe). And knitting, of course…
A chastity belt and dork at Mummy Museum. Ay, the mummy museum.
A man and his three burros during rush hour in Guanajuato (I love the mexican pedestrian signs too).
The school and Nick.
This might be the last time for two weeks I´m online, so felicidades a Heidi and I hope everyone is having a healthy and happy new year!
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01.08.07
Posted in travel at 9:00 am by wendy
We´re here in Guanajuato, safe and sound and enrolled in a language immersion school.
Off to explore the city and find a warm cafe to study in.
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12.18.06
Posted in Fiber Friday, Shop Updates, Victoria, Wheel Wednesday, dogs, shameless marketing monday, spinning, travel at 1:13 am by wendy
Keeping the catchup short and sweet (scroll down for dog stuff and whatnot):
Wheel Wound Wednesday!
The plastic cup on the footman that goes over the bearing on the wheel has flanges of a sort so it can pop over the bearing and then be held tight by a ring. The
instructions talk about removing the cup from the bearing with a twisting motion, so I was holding it with the sides of my thumb and index finger instead of my fingertips and it pinched a bit of skin out.It didn’t hurt, but it surprised me, as I was talking to someone at the time. I hate bleeding in public.I go to the spinning group straight from work, so my hands and nails are generally a mess from being washed a zillion times. So, um, sorry about all the hangnailies, hope it doesn’t offend anyone’s delicate sensibilities. I keep my nails really short, because, well just trust me, it’s better that way.
Fiber Friday
Remember the 80s merino/tencel 50/50 blend I showed on the wheel a while back?
I finally got around to taking a picture of the two ply made from it:
This spins up like buttah, so it’s easy to make a low twist soft and silky single but I think next time I spin this up, I’ll spin with more twist to I can have a plied yarn with a more extreme angle of twist and more bounce. It’s 172 yards and 2.5 oz, and 10 wpi. Hmmm…a Rosechapeau from Hilari?
I finished spinning the 80s merino singles to make a 3 ply worsted weight, and have plied up four skeins:
There are differences among the skeins, in colors, in singles spun and the plying, although they are less dramatic in person.Two of the skeins have an embarrassing “tag” sticking out, a little section of single which plied back on itself and then went into the plied yarn, like a little quarter inch two ply arm wavin’ howdy.
This comes from me not paying enough attention and letting slack get into a ply and letting the twist run along past it. I didn’t use my ghetto homemade plying card and I really should have.
The Victoria’s lazy kate is not tensioned, so the bobbins spin a little more freely and it makes it easier for that to happen. After the first time I saw that (when skeining up the first bobbin) I stuck a sports bra on the middle post of the lazy kate, and it provided resistance so the lazy kate was tensioned. (Why a sports bra? It was on the floor next to the spinning chair. I’m a slob.) The next bobbin after that, I had cleaned the house and thus the sports bra was nowhere around the spinning chair. I lifted a paper towel from a nearby table and wedged that around the middle post. That worked just fine. Then, one of the dogs must have stolen the napkin to shred as it was nowhere to be found with the fourth skein. No biggie, I thought…nope. Upon skeining, I found another little tag. Dangit.
Hypothetically: you could cut the little tag, but then the ply could work loose and form a loop, or worse an end waving out there like a frayed little piece o’ spinner’s shame. You could knit it just as is, and hide it to the back of the work and hope it doesn’t flex to the front, but really…you should cut the yarn on either side, treating it like a knot in the yarn.
Ugh, I hate ends.
So, here’s the skein breakdown (not interesting to anyone but me, but since I’m always losing these scraps of paper I write stuff down on…) 168 yards/2.4 oz, 176 yards/2.5 oz, 190 yards/2.7 oz, and 230 yards/3.2 oz. So that’s 10.8 oz and 764 yards at 9-11 wraps per inch.
I have two bobbins left, one with .6 oz, and another with 1.9 oz. So, plenty of yarn for another skein, but I have to attempt winding .6 or so of the second bobbin into a separate ball for makin’ the 3ply. Sigh. Dork.
So…I thought I had 14 oz of this stuff…I wonder where the other .7 went? I guess I pulled out more disorganised portions than I realised. I’ll probably find a little bit of it somewhere…oh wait, I remember where the .7 is. A sample two ply I made way back when. Never mind me…talking/thinking/typing aloud.
Anyway, even if I do manage to use all of that leftover 2.5 oz and end up with another 176 yards, that leaves me at 940 yards…cutting it a bit fine, even for a worsted gauge st st V-neck sweater of snug fit for me, I think. Anyway, that’s counting yardage before it’s made. It may end up a manly matching hat, mittens and scarf set. Ooh la la.
I guess the fiber key to this section of the post was 80s merino, straight up and the mixed half and half of tencel. Huh.
So let’s make that the marketing monday blurbo and get that over with eh? Yeah. You can click here to look at prices if you’d like to buy some to spin yourself (please note the new put up amounts including 5 oz! –1 oz to play with for sampling, 4 oz to do a little project with–) but they are undyed. In the new year, after we get back from the month long hiatus, I’ll have dyed fibers for sale.
Have you ever seen how big ten pounds of Kona Superwash is?
My gigantic, unscoured, sportweight superwash lover…So much for “short and sweet” catch up, oy.
Random: so I was just leaving a comment on Elabeth’s blog and I made a cheesy pun. Then I thought, “whorling dervish?” That would be a cute business name! Maybe better than this foreign language name that makes so many people go “leebahlahbah whatnow?”! So google turned up no whorling dervish, and no server responded at whorlingdervish.com…but my host, dreamhost (a host I’ve been very happy with and a good recc from MJ lo so long ago, and they give free hosting to charities, how cool is that?) says it’s taken. Bummer.
My downstairs neighbor asked me if I know how to crochet or knit and if I could teach her and I nearly snorted my brains right out the back of my head. I believe I said something like, “I’m not much of a hooker, but I rock the knitting house.”
Fershizzle, I’m all up on the knizzle.
Anyway, I’m going to try and get together with her sometime this week to spread the knitting virus.
Pomona/Angelina is doing awesome, and proving that her Mommy is a good one and she’s made a lot of progress with her. She’s been coming out for snuggles and hanging out in the living room of her own free will and snoozing on the couch.
Fast asleep:
So freakin’ cute. I love this beautiful girl, but I’m really glad she has a great home and that her mommy has let her visit us.
The boys are doing well at the kennel. When I do a turnout shift, I let them out on the slab together after the shift (they go out with a bigger group together during the shift too) and we play a little. A bunch of dogs got adopted this weekend (Nick and my favorite among them) but not Snuggle and Kilt. Snuggle has an adoption lined up, but he’s had that twice before and they just seem to evaporate. He and Kilt are both so normal, so easy, it’s a bit funny that they’ve been so long at the group. It’s partly a testament to how fantastic all our dogs are, really. Compared to the all breeds rescue work we used to do, there’s a rare few that Nick and I wouldn’t want to have in our home.I had a
dye workshop on Saturday. It was very small since most everyone is caught up in holiday madness, but it went very well, and the students went home with some beautiful handpainted fiber and yarn and some new skills, knowledge, and confidence. The next date is the third Saturday in February, which hopefully will be warm and sunny, because this kitchen is a bit small and while that is sort of the point (you don’t have to have a big honkin’ separate studio! although boy wouldn’t that be awesome) people still need space to paint and work comfortably.
The other night I had the television on and It’s a Wonderful Life started. I’ve never seen it before so I watched it (and marveled at the marketing, the commercials seemed very much geared toward women with catastrophic brain injuries [seriously, the desperate lameness of the yoplait commercial “dating a masseuse -shh!–good” makes me want to punch something. Same with diamond commercials.]) and really liked it…but I turned it off when he started being mean to his family. So I guess I still haven’t seen it. I’ll put it in my Netflix queue.
And WHOA. A few days ago I looked at the prices for going to and from D.F. (Mexico City) from/to San Diego and was irked to find them over a thousand dollars for the both of us, after taxes etc. So when I looked last night and could snag the roundtrip tix all told for $800, I did, although I was worried that this was the start of a drop and they’d go lower and I’d be “d’oh!”ed. I told Nick about this and he said, “Yeah, and now we won’t look at the prices anymore.” We both don’t have much of a stomach for fluctuating values.
But I did look.
And ¡jolín! Wow, I’m glad I bought those tickets, as the price has jumped right back up. The industry is a mystery. Is it exchange rate? Demand? Some sort of ridiculously complicated algorithm?
I am so excited abut this trip. I’m going to teach a beginning spinning class at our local library on the sixth, then -boom!- off on the seventh for 29 days of aventura pura…pues lo que espero. I wish I wasn’t going to miss TNNA, I wish I wasn’t going to miss a month in the “industry’s high season,” but…it’s Mexico. A country I love–I’ve been to more states in Mexico than I have here in the U.S.of A. And Guatemala and Belize. Whee!
If you were a cold sleeper going to a place with lows of 40-50ºF, do you think you’d try to get away with one of those polar fleece sleeping bags (like from L.L. Bean), or go with a real sleeping bag?
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11.21.06
Posted in books, knitting, travel at 12:26 am by wendy
(assortment post)
See, the title has a little to do with what is probably my most exciting piece of news (to us). I’ll get back to it in a moment.
Meanwhile, this is going to be random.
Look familiar? Maybe not, it was a long time ago.
Amy sent me
a wonderful feel-better package with this Fleece Artist 2 ply fingering weight BFL and I immediately started a top down raglan and relatively
jammed through it, got halfway through the last sleeve and…stopped. Picked up something else to knit. What? I don’t know what.In my year end panic I’m in a frenzy of resurrecting UFOs, and this is one that’s pretty close to done, so it’s back in the mix. I’ve completely forgotten how many sleeve decreases to do, and I may even read my knitting to match it as I go, maybe. The little froggy stitch marker is part of a set of six I bought off etsy.com–the same seller has
these cute sheepie stitch markers too. Instead of jump rings she uses a continuous wire so there’s nothing to snag. The frog being practically my scot, me gustan mucho, almost as much as the ones
Mary-Kay made me (those are my good luck charms for troublesome knitting).
Holy cow!
The New Testament read by Johnny Cash! You can listen to a sample on audible.com of him reading from Matthew. He did a great job. But hey, I loved his version of “Hurt” too, so no surprise there.
I should have mentioned in my last post:That multi-color green & brown self-striping Noro lookalike that Snuggle found so appealing? That’s Boku, by Plymouth Yarns which I bought at our local Two Sisters and Ewe. It’s 95% wool, 5% silk, 99 yards/50g, a similar gauge to Noro’s Kureyon or Silk Garden. It’s tweedy, so I think the silk is probably tussah noils, but I don’t care. It feels very much the same, maybe less dense feeling, oddly. Not much vm and no sericin, but I did find a knot. It’s $2 cheaper per ball than Kureyon, and feels about the same, although I admit that my disdain for the Noro probably means I’m not the best judge of comparisons. Anyway, it takes ripping well. I ripped it back to the ball and restarted, doing a baby gansey based on
Knitting Ganseys. Sort of tradition with a twist, if I want to sound all pretentious about it.
I am so excited. I love Mexico. It’s a great country, with an incredible climate range–nearly any kind of environment you might desire, it is within Mexico’s bounds, forested highlands, jungle lowlands, desert and wetland… It’s an understatement to say that it is “too bad” that it is a country that was/is subject to some amazingly effective systematic oppressive regimes and cultural indoctrination, but we love it. Nick and I are going on this
tour. I know that tours probably have the same reps as cruises, but, as veterans of
this tour, we can definitely vouch that if you choose well, you’ll get access to activities and people that you (probably) couldn’t get just traveling alone (or “alone” in a couple). As with our last Mexico vacation, we’ll probably go down a week before and stay more time after to do more exploring in Mexico, since much of our tour is in Guatemala and Belize, although it starts and ends in Cancun. We’ll probably fly in and out of DF, and take buses or internal flights back and forth. We want to check out Guanajuato (ever read “Next in Line”? I used to be a huge Ray Bradbury fan), San Miguel de Allende, Puebla, Mérida again, and whatever else seems to be along the way. We’d really like to go to Oaxaca City again, but Nick’s not comfortable with the whole plainclothes policemen shooting into crowds thang. Fuddy-duddy. Anyway, we’re reading and thinking, planning and talking, a bit of the best parts of a trip– and hoping fares drop a bit soon. I don’t want to wait too long, but the fares seem a little high right now. I’m really enjoying
The People’s Guide to Mexico. I’m not sure if we can really pull off the
mochilero schtick, but we’re dang well going to try. We’re going to be down there about a month, so we’ll have to pack light. We schlepped way too much stuff around last time.
Wheee!
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