Tilt-a-whirl

Libran's are team players...

Yes, collaboration is good, you know. I am having fun sending yarn up to British Columbia, seeing it transformed into REALLY pretty socks by Sivia A picture came in the inbox today...Sivia's pretty Cherry Blossom sock made with Sock! in Pink. Yes you do see some sparkly beads in there.

Here's the deal...when Holly, the Wandering Web Master comes home from her trip, we are going to begin offering this pattern, as well as Sivia's Waterlily Sock (uses Sock! in Peacock), as kits, complete with those little bead thingies. Sound good? I think that you are really going to like them. :o) See? Collaboration is cool.

Collaboration happens close to home as well and Tinkerbelle, AKA Brenda Patipa is having a hard time concentrating on winding and slinging yarn because her designer brain is whirring right along on a sweater that is in production in two fibers (BFL yarn and cotton), a fabulously creative scarf with Sock! Merino, like nothing I could imagine, a shawl in Fingering and a stunning pullover in the new Baby Alpaca/silk. Keep knitting, Brenda...

Now then, I have been doing some fiber stash elimination, simply because I want to finish stuff off before I allow myself to dive into the fabulous cashmere that came out of a Wild Things pot. Oh man...this new cashmere is like nothing I have spun before. I broke into the bale yesterday. :o) So, here are a couple of diverse things. I spun up an orphan 4 ounce bumplet (I made that up) of
Earth Birth merino. The usual center pull ball shenanigans that I like to do when I have a onesie like this. It is nothing, if not bright.

From the ridiculous to the sublime...the second shot is a project with Angora in a Loam color, shot through and through with gold. I think that Gold Mine is a good title. The Angora will bloom nicely and make you hunt for the gold...only fitting.

I'm pretty excited to say that The Husband is helping me to expand my portion of the Dyeraj and tomorrow we get more storage brought in so that I am not stepping over boxes of the new yarns. A place for everything...yatta yatta yatta. Just seeing the open space right now is thrilling to me.

That's it for now...time to go ply the last of my garnet silk/merino so that I can dig into that inviting cashmere. Sugarpie has not discovered it yet but then it has been hot... :o)

More Stuff

So, when I got up and checked the email this morning, I had an email from the knitting whiz and great customer, Sue Grandenfield from Oz. She has what we call Flame Fingers...a speedy knitter who seems to want to chalk it up to the adrenaline of World Cup viewing. I dunno...you rock, Sue. She was telling me how she had reversed the colors of Brenda Zuk's Smyrna, which is part of the Byzantium sock collection. Sue calls the new one Anryms. I really like it...of course I LOVE orange...must be the October birthday.

Repeat after me...oooooooohhhhhh, ahhhhhhhh. Great knitting, Sue. I love the Anryms and I know that Brenda loves what you did. See, People? She did this while watching TV.

So my DIL rose to the challenge and buried her Flickr page on the comments page but I am going to out her right here. Check out the NZ photos.

Let's see, what's new? Swatching with the new Baby Alpaca/silk sport weight has begun. Oh my heavens...when Holly comes back from vacation, I am going to get this stuff up on the site for you. It is soooooooo beautiful and feels like cashmere. YUMMY!

The heavy worsted weight wool has begun the journey of dyeing and I expect Miss Holly to fire up a cool bag for y'all...felt city, baby.

Ummm...the magnets are on the way. Yes, I reordered them AND there will be ANTENNA BALLS, too! I can't wait to see them...who needs Jack in the Crack when you have a KNITTER'S antenna ball. Awesome! I'll Alert The Media as soon as they arrive.

Show and Tell

The linemen were back this morning. I kid you not. The power was out for a little while longer while they replaced the second transformer, making certain that this would never ever ever ever (touch wood) happen again. After the fiasco wrought by the man who got to die instead of go to jail (you know, Kennyboy and Enron) the infrastructure was not maintained properly (hey, Queens...sound familiar?) and so the prolonged torrid heat has been kicking the behinds of these ageing transformers. Now I know what it sounds like when one of those puppies blows up, as it did yesterday afternoon. BOOM! This is followed by the swear words and the sound of two computer rooms and beeping battery back-up thingies. No more boom, just the drone of the house fan and the little wall unit AC. Ahhhhhhhhhh...

Funny, after dealing with the heat and no air movement, being in the HOT dye room this afternoon with a fan blasting, I felt like...HEY, no problem! I've been getting a lot of requests for solid colors of Fatima and so some beautiful rich shades are going to be on the shoulders of the people knitting Tink's Lacey Shrug

Work has been going on again, (now that the lights are back on...sigh) with the two new yarns. I am glad that I have them to futz with now that I am in the ration mode for Sock! until the giant box hits the porch. Yes people, I am STILL waiting and can't wait to have tall stacks of cones littering the S Abode. Whattanightmare...SO, I am mighty glad to be spinning and dyeing and just doing OTHER stuff in anticipation of the workload for now and Stitches East. Bring it on, baby.

Now, on to the title of today's post. I have three sock knitters that sent me pictures of their wonderful work and I want to show them off to you! First is my buddy Kathleen Day who made the cutest pair of What-a-melon socks for a friend and finished off heels and toes with a pink yarn. So great, Kathleen.

Next comes Deepa, who did this great Pomatomus in South Pacific (yes, it is reading a little too green). See? you CAN make some of the handpaints play nicely in a fancy pattern! I am in awe, Deepa and thank you for sharing your picture with me/us. :o)

Last, but not least is Terri, who is modeling the latest way to wear a sock. :o) This is a beautiful rendition of the Embossed Leaf pattern in IK and Terri made this with Sock! in Blue Sky. I am liking this look...were you doing the beauty queen wave? Beautimus.

Thanks for sending the pictures, you guys. I love show and tell day. Hey, we will all have to wait until July '07 for the big show and tell when Alison Hyde's book is published. I can't wait to see it, Alison.

Speaking of books...it is time to pre-order my buddy Vicki Stiefel's next one. Hey, if you like the CSI or House or any show dealing with Medical Examiners, you will have a blast with Vicki's protagonist. Each time I have finished a book (great bathtub or beach read) I say to her...VICK! How do you think of such gross stuff? Just a gift...the gift of ewwwwwwww. Gotta love it and I have to love that I have writers in my life. Oh yes and I can't wait for my daughter in law to begin publishing her photos...this girl is uber-talented and another Vicki. Hey, Mrs. S-The Younger...I dare you to put your Flicker addie in a comment. Double dare ya. People, you should see what she did with her eye and a camera down in NZ...spectacular. Perhaps she will share with the class.

Time to move out of this room...Tank is snoring and filling the room with green clouds...no wait, they are both in here...SASHA is filling the room with green clouds. Lemme outtahere.

Linemen to the rescue

Yup, it has been another day without power, looking at a battery operated thermometer that read at it's worst, 109F. To say that it has been a cranky ass day is an understatement. It was just our 20 house court, which is the nutty thing. The power company sent someone yesterday to do a quick fix but at 9 am this morning the transformer that was carrying double the load quit. We had false hope at about 2 pm when there was flickering and wishful thinking. Nada. About 20 minutes later there was a boom and I knew that there was no hope. We kept getting appointment times that stretched later and later into the day but when the night came and we figured that we were forgotten (water is pouring out of the freezer) we heard a truck on the road below the property. Could it BE? Is it Santa? Nah...boo hoo. I was moping out my office window, trying to get a whiff of a breeze when the street lit up. Hmmm, someone coming home? Nope...the light is slow moving. Then I heard it...a T R U C K. No...TWO trucks and one was a big one with a two man cherry picker. The troops had arrived, much to my surprise. The husband strolled down to talk to them and these guys had been pulled from Placerville, up where we were looking at houses last summer...emergency duty. Halleluiah, baby. They did it. They fixed the lines and installed a new transformer at the other end of the block, which means that THIS won't be happening again.
Tomorrow morning, I promise to post what I had planned to show you today...a passel of wonderful knitting by some of YOU!

Excited for a good night's sleep...

Good night...I have my fan and perhaps will get some sleep!

Back in Bidness

Insult to injury? I think so...last night the freaking power went out and stayed out until Mr Lineman came with his hand dandy transformer poker thing and fired up the power to our street. Yeah...from 9 PM to 2 PM and the sun gave me 108 before the power came on. I know, I need not act like a weenie since the folks in Queens and St. Louis have it much worse but it stunk on ice. There, I said it. The dogs and I are a LOT happier now and poor Tink, who did not pick up her messages this morning showed up all ready and raring to go and got a raging maniac at the door saying...GO AWAY there is no POWER and other rude things. No, Tink I am not going to do X,Y or Z right now...go find someplace cool to hunker down (she has no air and likes mine, when I have said power)...come back when I have had the ability to be cool and get into my fridge.

Tonight we have a going away meal with The Son and DIL. Yeah, they really ARE going, selling most of their large belongings and heading east in just over a week, flying one-way with three cats. Yes, I am shaking my head but whatareyagonnado? We will treat them to a nice dinner and then pat them each on the head and sayyyyyy...in our best flight attendant voices...buh bye now. :o(

Thanks for all of the concern, by the way. Mom does not have Alzheimers but HAS reached the stage where we will finally be put on her accounts so that we can pay her bills for her. It is a big deal to me and a one-way transition, much like giving up driving. It means that we are taxiing toward the runway but I don't know which airport we are in, so the runway could be way the BLEEP out there or just a short hop. Everything depends on distance and how fast I have to fire up the jets. Ya know? She must have been moved by my emotional outburst the other day and pulled herself and her finances together, getting ready to hand over the reins to us without regret. Yeah...I know. Whew.

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

One Fifteen Point Two

Done, done, done with this roasting. I mean it, really. We escaped the inland fire and joined our bretheren along the tippy edge of SF at the Zoo, which is USUALLY bathed in fog and not such a nice place during the summer. Woah, somebody float some ice blocks in the poor Polar Bear's water, will ya? I must admit that taking the day and heading to the SF Zoo with Shnicklefritz and his parents was a lovely way to spend a day away from the torrid heat. (I still think that I should just bite the bullet and get up at 2 am to do my work because the dye room is impossible to be in these days past 10 am. I know, whiney, aren't I? Creativity like mine takes good music and temperate climate, darn it! :o)

Hey, I thought that I would show you who in invisioned when I created Mombassa. He was regal and coiffed and hanging with the Mrs, right where we could luxuriate in his gorgeousness. Mmmmmmmmombassa.

Perfection. So much perfection that the Zoo has life sized sculptures of these two.

Oh, the humans aren't too bad, either...The Daughter and little Pipplesnips having a sit. All of the life sized bronze scuptures around the zoo have nice cushy "flooring" around them so that the kids can climb on the animals and feel their bodies and not crack their heads if there should be a slip of the foot. Lovely.

The zoo has two new giraffe babies. One is cared for by mama and the other one is a bottle baby. Check out this motherly love.

My favorite part of the zoo was the children's zoo. Hey...up close and personal with Churro sheep, angora goats and other riffraff. Of course the bucks were all safely tucked away but they were magnificent. I am just delighted with what has been done in SF with this place. I remember an embarrassment of a park...concrete and hard surfaces and just forlorn animals. Now there is grass and fabulous habitats and beautiful gardens. My daughter, who had recently been to San Diego said that she actually was more impressed by this one. High praise, indeed.

A fine time was had by all.

The Roller Coaster of Life

Ahhh, one of those days that reminds you that life is bittersweet. I headed out to the dye room early yesterday because I knew that it was going to be hot and the uninsulated Dye-raj is just evil when it gets over 100 out in the afternoon. I was preparing dye for a friend's Joseph's Coat merino fiber and the familar Dootoodoo musical tone assigned to my mom got me reaching for the phone. She sounded frantic. Are you sick? Did you fall? Do you need my help? No, no and yes. Let's just say that the situation warranted emergency action and showed me that the roll reversal is going to become complete very soon, which means that I have begun mourning my mother while she is still in her body. She thinks that it is going to be harder on me than it will be for her and I think that I agree. She is beginning the transformation toward the other side and I am going to be her gaurdian while allowing her to live in her home as long as possible. I don't know why I lost it as much as I did but perhaps it coming on the heels of my son and his bride moving far away...loss, period.

Oh hell, I am going to buck up...after all, I get to go to the zoo with my precious grandson for the first time, on Saturday. We are all going to love it, big time.

Yesterday afternoon was a funny one. Here I go blabbing my head off about the new yarns and here comes a phone call from Miss Alison..."ahem, you know that new baby alpaca/silk yarn you just got? Do you think that you could throw a skein of that into a pot for me right this minute? You can? I'll be right over". Yeah, Tink had just skeined off a bunch of them and I was able to get a couple dyed and dried by the time John The Blacksmith (her youngest) drove her over from the other side of the bay. Of course anyone that knows Alison will not be surprised that she fired up the knitting needles and got this one last project ready for her book. Needless to say, this stuff took the color in a gorgeous manner and I am more than pleased. Hey! for a mere $40 you too may be the proud owner of 750 yards of pure heaven...baby alpaca and silk. Mmmmmmmmmm. :o) Tinkerbelle has taken some samples home to get some gauge swatches done for this and the merino/angora (this will be $25 for 4 ounces/540 yards) and I expect to begin dyeing in earnest very soon. (I like these yarns so much that I have ordered MORE)

Well, there was not enough quiet time yesterday to allow me to work on my shawl so I fired up the Rose and threw 4 ounces of Bird of Paradise superwash merino at her. This is another center-pull ball ply and I am quite happy with how it turned out. I was rocking out with Tommy Lee and the boys, watching Rock Star...love that show. Bam...done.

It is a Spare the Air day here in the SF Bay Area and so I was lucky enough to get a shot of what summer means to me, here in my garden before it got too darned hot...Penstemon in the early morning. This stuff does nicely in the prairie garden at the Omaha Botanical Garden and it does nicely here in the Chaparral Garden in Lafayette...take the heat and drought or die, baby. That's ok, my neighbor likes to pretend that she is in England and the plants in my garden like the backwash of all of that watering...can you blame them?

I wonder if she would notice if I go run around in her sprinkers???

Waiting for the sun to go down so that I can go dye some more...

Hot but peaceful

I felt it this morning, really I did...the hint of that air that comes out of a refridgerator...Mother Nature's Air Conditioning. She fooled me, though...it was just a fake thing, this cooling that we wait for here. Well, it WAS cooler, only getting up to 106 instead of 110.5, so who's complaining? It just makes for cold food for dinner, ya know...cucumber, tomato, tuna and crackers. Yummy.

Today a couple of heavy boxes arrived on my doorstep...beautiful new luxury yarns, baby. There is a gorgeous baby alpaca/silk sport weight, a heavy worsted weight angora/merino/poly and last but not least, this fall's luxury in fingering weight sock yarn 20/80 angora/merino. Oh, baby this stuff is gorgeous. This will be THE gift yarn. I can't wait to get started and it couldn't have come at a better time...I am still waiting for the long delayed shipment of my sock yarn. I am rationed down to a slim few undyed skeins to last these two weeks. I will do my best to take care of your orders and then we will all just have to wait a little bit. This was a delayed pain, simply because I bought all that they had before this nightmare happened. We have done pretty well through this whole fiasco and it only mucked up the hopes of a store in Michigan. So...in the meantime, there is Sock! Merino, people...

I have finally started to photograph the Alpaca Lace so that when Holly comes back from her vacation, we can get it up on the site. Here are a couple of colors for you. Berry Poppins and Agua Fresca.

The day that I was doing the experimentation with the new Berry Poppins, I decided to put some color to a bit of Superwash Merino. Of course I couldn't stop the curiosity and so last night I spun up a 4 ounce piece and this afternoon I balled up the single and plied it from a center pull ball. I loooooove it.

Too Much

Here you go. I do not live in Palm Desert.

The only thing that saves us is that this is a relatively dry heat. I sent the Pixie home early. There will be no work in the dye room until the sun goes down. For the time being...it is giving me a headache.

There is something new, of course. It came in through the ether on Thursday and we got it up on the site on Sunday. Berry Poppins.

I am determined to make Sivia's shawl. I was certain that I had ADD because I could not concentrate on knitting the lace pattern enough to not make mistakes. I tore it all out and after talking with someone else that is knitting this, I have upped my needle size and my time per row and thankfully I am well on my way again. A few rows a day, just like normal people. I am just so used to sitting and knitting or spinning with a vengeance and this has not worked well for me, at least at the point where I have been able to see the pattern. Once I SEE a pattern, it is a piece of cake. Time to change into normal reading glasses, I think...too much focusing in and out with my normal progressive lenses...headache? What headache? Page one is complete and I am stopping for now. I will only knit on this when I am alone and not tired and there will be a chance for old cross-eyed me.

The dogs are flat and snoring. I think that I need to do the same. It is not quite 3 PM and I am waiting for Mother Nature's fever to break. Perhaps she is really really really pissed off about what those piles of knuckleheads are doing to each other (and all of those poor innocent souls caught in the middle) in the Middle East. ENOUGH ALREADY, DAMMIT!!!!!!!! I have friends on both sides of this mess and just wish that it would stop.

Yeah, I know...whazzzuppppppppppp?

I meant to be good. I meant to keep up the blather but then I found out that my son and his bride are pulling up stakes and moving to Connecticut at the end of the month. Wow! Ok...I am over that shock. So be it. Mrs. S the Younger can be closer to her parents and must be feeling a yen for goopy summers. I totally understand. So Mr. S the Younger is making it happen. Boom!

I reeled for a day, went to go watch Johnny Depp sashay and mince and then up to visit The Love of My Life on Sunday. He sits, people. Shnicklefritz, the Wonderchild.

I did knit in the Electric Rocket on the way up to Folsom. It is more of the same car knitting that happened mostly to and then partly from Michigan. I really wanted to make something with the Blue Faced Leicester yarn that I dye and so I am giving it a workout with this relatively mindless slip-stitch pattern for a cardie. The yarn is mucho yummy. I love it. This is Peacock and Gold. I know...yawn. It will get spiffy later on...trust me.

Speaking of knitting. I know that we have global warming but I am not going to take the hit for the sky falling or any other weird act of nature because I have tipped the balance of things by knitting someone else's pattern. I am a complete weenie and let Barb push me over. I started Sivia's Diamond Fantasy Shawl. I need to make one myself so that I don't have to keep bugging poor Rosemary to borrow hers for shows. I am having fun and it is like a nice little puzzle and with the help of my KAL buddies I will roar through this puppy. Of course The Husband is going to be hiding in his room so that he does not have to suppress his need to blah blah blah when I counting. Shhhhhhhhhh! I chose Sock! Merino in Pumpkin (I know that it looks gold...be quiet) and just love the way this yarn and pattern do so nicely in this Goldilocks Version that Sivia was kind enough to write up for this One Skein Wonder. Stay tuned. Now that I don't have to knit for pay anymore I can knit fun stuff with no guilt. :o)

Let's see...what else is new? Umm, Tinkerbelle is back. She likes her moniker enough to enrobe her ever present phone in its new look.

Speaking of Tink. We have some pictures of the patterns that were a big hit at Convergence and will soon be on the site. First is the super cute scarf that she calls Do the Wave. It is another One Skein Wonder, having been made from one skein of Sock! in South Pacific. You can just tie it simply or fold it in half and warm up that neck.

Very, very cool.

The other piece is the Lacey Shrug. It is made with two skeins of Fatima (in this instance she used The Sea) and is a quick little knit.

We have been having a lot of fun looking at new yarns and thinking of new designs but I need to keep forging on with dyeing. I know that those of you that are coming to Stitches East will have a lot of fun with the new pieces that are in the works.