Tilt-a-whirl

Pea Green Envy

Just when I was starting to back off a little and gain the ability to once again accept what ever is coming, my friend Vicki has to send me a load of pictures of an amazing ranch that she and her friends visited on the outskirts of Yellowstone. Come on, woman! I know that she is just trying to torture me, showing me pictures of wild critters and wide open spaces and no freeway noise. What I want to know, with all of this nature and fly fishing and horse riding is how short the cocktail hour was before people fell face down in their soup! Fresh clean air can be intoxicating enough! Evil woman...I may have to spin something just her color and wave it in front of her face.

So, yesterday. It was all about me, myself and I with the help of the ever present Thundering Herd.

I figured that it was time to see how much the SpinTech could do for me and so I vowed to get an 8 ounce bobbin of that blue silk/merino filled. Yes, I DID do it but it took me a lot longer than I had planned, simply because I have Pay Attention Disorder. .

Now, if I were once again locked into the house with the windows of the living room papered shut, I might have been able to fire this up in a few hours, but NO! I am sitting with the ST sitting on my grandmother's hope chest, spinning and staring out into the poor garden that was ravaged by the long long long withering heat spell.

Can I just sit there and spin? NOOOOOOOOO...I justify the hummingbird attention span by saying that if I sit and spin on the ST for several hours, my lard ass will turn into a bigger lard ass and I will be crippled from just sitting there feeding fiber into this thing. Fine! So what do I do the rest of the day? I alternate between spinning this silk/merino and digging August baked clay soil (I thought that I had finally softened most of this place...) saying that the ST is going to make me lazy...

Yeah, right...lazy. Just thankful for a freakishly cool day after all of that searing heat. It was so cool (and is again today) that I had to find some socks for my ever present Mephisto sandals. It was a day of spinning and digging and introspection and the occasional plaintive bark of a certain little puppy man that is starting to feel his Oats. Poor kid...he looks at me and gets a weird look on his face and barks, simply because he has NO idea what is going on with a certain part of his anatomy. Oy. Knock it off...I know that you love me but let's go chase a ball. (see, another reason that it took me so long to spin that blue stuff...these dangly bits are going to have to go, soon...poor baby. Poor Tank!)

The sleeves from hell are almost a matched pair, people.

Oh, my friend Brenda has finished and released her Shoal Waters Cardigan pattern, which is a wonderful vision completed with my Seaglass colorway and Sheila's buttons. I just know that it will be a big hit because the design will be wonderful for all shapes and sizes...not just Brenda's narrow figure. :o) I hope to get my pile of patterns from her soon. so that I can take them to King's Mt . Hmmm, time to fire up some more of that yarn. :o)

The clenching has begun

Gee, why can't I take advantage of the cool night air? I have been doing the fog dance for a couple of weeks now and when I get it, here comes Sugar Pie to join me in bed and wake me up enough to let in the heebeejeebees that will abound this week. Yes, this is THE week when The Husband finds out if The Corporation values him and wants him to continue the work that he has done for so many years now OR wants to turn their back on him and his aging colleagues. My friends...this really sucks, although it does not SUCK OUT LOUD...yet. :o) It is the waiting, at this point, that is a blessing and a curse. When we find out, there will be no more dreaming about what could be, like a lottery ticket dream, it will be an either/or situation and we will have to get busy, one way or the other.

We are now unsure if we will leave this place. Weird, I know. It is still a little house with limited space but it is The Known with a fixed, reasonable property tax bill while The Unknown would be a dream come true for me with peace and quiet and a big workshop and MORE land for the dogs to rocket around on BUT the property tax bill for such a place would be FIVE TIMES what we pay now. FIVE TIMES. Here in California there was something of a tax revolt a couple of decades ago, which haulted the out of control property taxes that were forcing older people out of their homes, simply because they could no longer afford the bill. Now, you can have people on a court such as ours paying sharply different rates of property taxes and amazingly enough there is one set of Original Owners, people who moved here when the home was built in 1954! I can imagine what they pay in tax in contrast to the newest arrivals on the court, who may pay 10 times the amount. Nothing is perfect and so we must weigh this additional part of the puzzle. Guh.

We did have a wonderful weekend, filled with family and friends, which was a very healing time. We had the opportunity to meet The Son's future mother-in-law, who was out from Connecticut, and I told him that he is a fortunate man to have her for his second mama. She is warm and caring and accepting. What more could I hope for? We spent Saturday night with my dear friend and colleague, Georg Palmer, a weaver that I have known since I started this whole thing over 20 years ago. As with most working fiber artists, she is found with her nose to the grindstone as much or MORE than me and so for us to all get together for dinner was another gift. Anyone that has been HERE for "bin diving" always thinks that this is a yarn house and I guess that for its diminuitive size, one could surmise this. Well...Georg has a really big house, probably close to three times the size of this place, including her studio, which made me pea green with envy. Now, you bin divers...think of my place and then imagine this family room with work in progress everywhere...spinning wheel and knitting machine and comfy chairs for knitting and hand finishing and then there is the staircase to the studio. Cones of yarn line this beautiful curved stairway and I just kept laughing out loud ( a couple of glasses of wine helped) at the yarn and yarn and yarn and more yarn! You see, weavers need a LOT of yarn...rooms of it, baby. I felt like a rank amateur, a poseur. Man, what could I do with a house that big...you fiber freaks would have lost your collective minds and me? I came home and thought that this was not such a yarn house, after all...I make it and send it off to a new home.

One last note on the happy side. I had a lovely visit with The Grandsonfetus and his parents and could not get over how much he has grown, since last I saw his sweet, narrow mama. We bought him a bed to celebrate. Here is his profile. What's a grandma to do??? I bought him a little A's uniform with his name, which happens to coincide with that of a star player, on the back. I am lost, I tell ya, lost.

Update on totals for MSF: we have reached the second $100 donation!

Electrician Day

I just looooooovvvvvvve waiting around for men in trucks, don't you? They make me pace. Yeah, it becomes an involuntary act, this pacing, especially when I turn my computer off (!) because I keep thinking that The Electrician is coming ANY MINUTE and that he is going to turn off the power. So where do I pace to? I pace from the living room where I am finishing this
to here, where the computer is turned off. Grrr. He did finally arrive and told me that I did not have to turn anything off for him to install an outdoor outlet and so I fired up this puppy as fast as I could...I was gettin' the shakes! :o)

The postman brought me some nice things BESIDES bills today, my favorite being a care package from Kerry with chocolate sauce, smelly soap and a very wonderful piece of Blue State material that makes me howl...now I am not showing the picture because if you are forced to live in a red state, I don't want to make you sad. :o) Let's just say that Kerry and I bonded at MS&W and never looked back...funny how that can happen over piles and piles of fiber!

Alrighty then, on to color. For some reason, gold is back and so I have dusted off my recipe and am back to dyeing it again. I love the color and I am really happy that folks are paying attention to it again. This shot is of some kid mohair and Misha skeins, which are bound for a cardigan jacket.

To show you that the best laid plans can sometimes produce something yummy as well...we did not achieve Lapis in toto but I see where I am going with it. In the meantime, I actually like this blue.

It is silk/merino and I can't wait to throw it on the wheel OR SpinTech.

Speaking of the SpinTech, I fired it up for a couple of hours last night and got a second 4 ounce bobbin spun and then that 8 ounce total plied. Wrote a little song about it...

Returning to normal with tools

Yeah, baby, yeah. Who is this peeking out of the box?
Yes, it is here...The SpinTech.

I let it sit on the kitchen table until The Husband came home so that he could inspect it in his Professor Gadget way, telling me how it was made and yatta yatta yatta...oh, so easy? Why didn't you invent it, Buster? Let's just say that this lovely spinner, which was replaced by a bicyle in the life of Carolyn has begun to kick some fiber ass in the S household. I sat down with it last night, just to give it a whirl and Ummm, I spun 4 ounces of silk/merino dyed top in 85 minutes. I can only imagine how it will go when I am really prepared to roar through a bunch of well prepared fiber.

Yes, I really really did work on the darned sleeve yesterday. I do not know why I am having a creative block with the stupid sleeves but I think that I cracked it yesterday and here is the progress.

Once I get this monkey off of my back (sleeve number two will take 1 spoonful of brain) I can get on with the rest of the knitting that is backed up in my darned brain. Let's just say that the addition of the SpinTech to the arsenal around here has opened up my production.

Here is some of the latest black baby alpaca...Riqueza. She is about 1/3 finished at this point and I have yet to, as you can well see...pick all of the little bits of stuff out of her yarn but it is gorgeous stuff. Yum

Time to wash out some skeins stewing since yesterday. I decided to see what the new Shade Garden colorway would look like on some different fibers and so I threw Worsted, Kid, Petal and Alpaca Lace onto the table and had my way with them. I'll show you when they are dry.

A must see...

Check your closets for this!

The Fever Broke

I swear, Lafayette has been having hot flashes the past few weeks, with no relief. We have lived out here for 23 years, moving from Oakland in AUGUST. AUGUST in Lafayette is like the devil's green room...awful. Of course, when we moved here, this house had no fans or AC and the first real August day that the kids and I had back then, we just lay on the floors like dogs, waiting for the torture to end. We finally learned that if we looked west and prayed we could WILL the fog in over the hills to Moraga and our relief would come, after three days. I would call my mom, who lives one town west and one town closer to the set of hills that divide chilly Berkeley from hot Contra Costa County, to ask if she could see the fog throwing itself over the hill. If the answer was affirmative, it meant that we would sleep that night. Now, a 105-107 degree day in this neck of the woods is a lot different from the 90 degree days that Kerry endures...we don't have the swampy sauna heat...just the beating down oh man, will the house ever cool down heat. It did today. I went outside at 6 am with the dogs and there it was...brrrrrrrrrrrrr, thank dog. Yes, I know...we have been looking in El Dorado County! (that is on hold right now...) but THERE homes have Central Air. MMMMMMMMMMMM. We have a box in the wall...not a swamp cooler, just an AC with the help of a reciprocating saw and a couple of tall men, put in many many years ago. It works but it is not CENTRAL...I centrally locate my spinning wheel right in front of it, though. :o)))

Elizabeth asked me about the new El Dorado yarn and so I have a picture of some of the colors that will go up on the site soon.

Oh, and another thing, I did a sample of that new Biffle yarn that I have been monkeying around with.

That is the Shade Garden colorway that sort of fell into place on the table last week. I actually like the way that it knits up, which is good...it looks nicer reskeined and knitted than it did in the original dyed skein, which for me is quite telling. Lots of times, stuff that looks dazzling in skeins disappoints in knitting. I know this well because for years I have KNOWN how wonderful some of my colorways knit up but until I reskein them for the fun of it, breaking up the way the dye is applied, people don't "see" the potential. This one was a laugh on ME because I did not relate to it at all, looking at this first big BFL skein...now, I like it. Haha on me.

Had some visitors

Nope, not knitters or spinners, just a couple of young sisters and their babes. It is darned hot out there, as it has been for weeks now but I am surprised that they were being so bold in the daylight hours. They may THINK that it is yummy in our yard but MOST of the things have the universal NO DEER signs on them...they DID like the Crepe Myrtle, though...mine is still a bush.

Sorry for the foggy looking second shot. I remembered to use my zoom and it set off the darned flash. Soon after this and the death of my batteries, I went outside and encouraged them to move their little brown butts across the street...heck, they come up to the porch at night, the naughty girls. Tasting, always tasting. It drives the dogs WILD.

My room is echoing

It took so much effort to scrape together and box all of the crapola that I had in this room and now that is ok to move back in here (the floors are very beautiful red oak) I am slowly slowly filling it. Not enough to stop that lovely singing in the towel-free bathroom echo, that you know that you all loved as much as I did as a kid. Admit it... So, I am listening to this while trying to think if I am just going to throw caution to the wind and put all of the stuff back in here or eliminate some things. I just love the LESS aspect of it all. Of course there is no LESS here. (that's funny...I am looking for this file under spinning and in my post lunch stupor there it is under soinning. Nice.)
So, disregarding the out of focus left paw there, see...I am spinning some deeply black baby alpaca. Raw stuff, right out of the bag. Here is a picture of the staple.


This is Riqueza's 05 blanket from Lin Murray and man, is it ever soft. Yes Joyce this is YOUR yarn...finally it is your turn.

Friday was the last day that I was in the dye room, since Mother Nature wasn't trying to roast us on the spit early in the day. I was able to translate the look of the handspun silk/merino in that wild Lime-ade color that had people salivating at the Fiberarts Market. Phyllis buttonholed me into promising to do this colorway in a hand painted mill spun array, so I took up the challenge.

What you see there is the silk/merino single that I call Max, the new Alpaca Lace and the big boy is Biffle. (these bad boys come in one pound skeins...a lot of yarn to wrestle)

We HAD to get out of the house yesterday, simply because after this week of being cooped up together with the stress of moving all of our crap OUT of our rooms and then back IN, beginning yesterday, we just needed to get out. There were errands and then there was a trip to the movies, which in my opinion are just crazy expensive these days. If it is $9.50 to go to the movies in Pleasant Hill then it must be $90 to go in NYC! Hmmm? What say you urbanites? Anywayyyyyyy, we finally got to see War of the Worlds. I was not about to go to see a Tom Cruise movie after he had been shooting his yap off about mental illness and other such Science Fiction Writer's Religion nonsense but I had cooled down long enough to forget that it was him up on the screen. Ok, so, Vicki...I loved it. It scared the pants offa me. Spielberg created a scary scary boogieman movie that was NOT a popcorn movie, simply because it was too damned scary. (My poor lemonade was just sitting there in the arm rest as I got lower and lower into my comfy rocking chair seat.) YIKES! TC is still an idiot but he is still a great action movie actor and can cry real tears. Hah! What say you all about the talent of little Dakota Fanning? I was looking at how she has grown up in this movie, trying to imagine her as an adult and I think that she will be another Jody Foster...smart and able to bridge the gap of kid to adult actor without having that odd look of a kid that was adorable as a puddin' head kid who just grows up with an unexpected look. Hmmm, kind of like Tank. You know, that chunky little black puppy who grew long and not so tall and who has a black body and a Chocolate Heddddd. In the words of Dr. Lee...someting wong.

Sorry that I missed the harlot when she was just over the hill but looking at the pictures on her blog this morning, I spy Miss Alison framed in Socksocksock's needles, there in Berkeley. Oh, and in Seattle, there is my little sister Kim (we share a birthday) and our wonderful Sam. Lucky Harlot. Sam...greeeeeeeeeeeeeeen.

Alpaca lace

You know what? This stuff that arrived today could turn me into a lace knitter. What's that you say? Ice cubes showing up in Hades? Hmmm? All together now...mmmmmmmmmmmm.

Yeah, it finally arrived on the porch of Chez S and I can't wait to get my hands on it. See those spots? I swear...I DO wear rubber gloves...every time. Such a messy messy dyer.

The Floor Guys showed up today to finish the job. You know, we waited the whole day for them yesterday and NADA. The Husband calls the boss of the company and she claims that it was the fault of the guys and they said that she does this all of the time...I believe THEM. Oh well, our life in chaos will just last until Saturday, when we can begin to put it all back. Well, not ALL back...we now have the opportunity to decide to eliminate some furniture (why do we end up with so many DESKS?) before moving back into our offices. Less is more, baby. The floors look shiny and stink to high heaven. Who knows how these guys are able to have children, smelling that stuff all of the time. Dain Brammage.

I have been accused today of creating yarn porn. I don't know about THAT...it seems kind of drastic. I did do this new odd colorway for me. This is it on the Biffle.

I don't think of this in the least bit torrid...more on the aloof side...cool tones, which are way out of my palette.

Tomorrow I must get on the promised painted version of this.

Say a prayer to the sink goddess...The Husband is having a hell of a time with the new faucet, poor guy. Lots of moaning and sighing coming from under there. I know when to stay the hell away and when to go hold something...

Doctors Without Borders

This is just a simple announcement. Because of the deep need of the people in Niger and other places serviced by these remarkable heroes, 10% of sales from The Website will be donated to Doctors Without Borders until further notice. I am thankful for my ability to crab about a puppy chewing a wall, annoying smells of floor finish and the energy to do what I do.