Category Archives: Words Words Words

Purple Mohair Update

Well, this is nice. I was worried that the mohair would get stiff when spun and plied this tightly, but I am pleased to be wrong. It’s not silk, or even Corriedale, but it’s not awful. It feels very sturdy, and it looks quite good. I don’t think I’d spin an entire project of sock yarn out of this (or rather, I don’t think I’d want to wear a sock made completely out of this yarn) but I’d probably wear a sock knit from yarn made of this plied with something else. So for what it’s worth: 0.2 oz/5 grams of hand-dyed 70% mohair/30% merino, chain-plied into light fingering weight yarn (that’s the orifice threading hook I made for myself this morning above the yarn):

For those who were interested in how the colour split in the dyeing process, yielding the pale purple, hints of blue, and touches of pink, here you go: this is what the variations look like spun up and chain-plied:

I have got to start remembering to throw the penny into the pictures for size comparison again.

Mohair!

Ceri has asked for pictures of my mohair adventures thus far, and so:

Today’s dye experiment: a soft lilac (it was supposed to be a pale plum, but purples are tricksy dyes)

Mohair laceweight (or what will be laceweight once I ply it) [IT WANTS TO BE LACEWEIGHT, I swear; it drafts so beautifully in a semi-woolen draw into a thread-thin yarn]:

Yesterday’s two-ply worsted weight (the large skein) and a mohair singles yarn (sport/DK weight, I suspect):

In non-spinning news, I am slogging through another epic fantasy project (I am definitely taking this genre off the list of genres I’ll accept from now on), and I roasted pork and made pork-onion soup today. Also, yesterday Gryff pelted down the hall into the living room, jumped on the wooden chest, and slid right off into the window. You know, the window that HRH sealed with plastic last week? Yes. One large cat-shaped hole in the plastic. HRH was *not* be pleased. (It was hilarious to me, too, until HRH came home.) He patched it with a spare bit of plastic, but there was much grr in the atmosphere. Not so fun. And then the boy brought a deck of cards into the kitchen and enthusiastically proposed that we all play Go Fish, and all was well.

And bloody hell, our phone battery is dying. It holds a charge for about a half-hour. This makes my weekly hour-long chats with my mum somewhat challenging. So tomorrow I’ll head over to Angrignon and buy a new one. (We’ve had the phone for about eight years, and the battery seems to last almost exactly four years, so not so bad.)

Weekend Roundup, Concert Recap Edition

We had a tremendously lazy Saturday morning which we all needed for our collective mental health. Saturday afternoon while the boy napped I weighed out a quarter-ounce of the Tussah silk I’d bought on Friday and spun it up into a 56 yards of two-ply laceweight:

The silk drafts and spins like a dream, into a lovely soft yarn that I pat a lot. The tiny green skein is also silk, coloured with some leftover dye solution I had in a jar. Wow, does silk ever gobble up dye. It’s variegated because I dropped the dry mini-skein into the dye instead of untwisting it and soaking it first. I don’t doubt that pre-soaked and properly loose it will dye very evenly.

When the boy got up he and HRH worked out in the backyard, putting away the garden furniture and toys for winter, and emptying the very broken sandbox so it could be recycled.

We had an early dinner, and then it was time to dress up for our first official concert under the direction of our new conductor. The boy chose a very nice red cabled sweater to wear. The concert was lovely. Pressing past the usual enthusiastic support I had feedback that the sound was more focused and rich, so evidently we’re doing something right. I was very happy with my performance in the first half, but intermission apparently broke me because I lost focus in the Beethoven. Still, it was very enjoyable. Our clarinet soloist was a knock-down success; I really enjoy doing the second Weber clarinet concerto. We had a fabulous audience of about one hundred people, among whom were Jeff and Devon, Lu, Ceri and Scott, and HRH and the boy, who stood on his father’s lap to applaud and cheer loudly at the end of the Beethoven. Thanks, everyone! And our spring concert has already been announced: Saturday 27 March 2010 (2010, yikes) at Beaurepaire United Church (25 Fieldfare, Beaconsfield, QC) we will be playing Vaughn Williams’ ‘Wasps’ overture, a Haydn symphony (I forget which one, sorry), a Debussy suite (possibly ‘Images’? I don’t think it’s ‘Bergamesque’ because I would certainly remember that, but I didn’t get the title noted down in time and now I’ve forgotten, woe!) and something by Butterworth. Mark the date down now (or whenever you get your 2010 calendar).

Sunday morning I picked up Mousme and Ceri and we met Jan over at Karine‘s house for a couple of hours of knitting and sewing. (Bonus points to those of you who recognise the membership of Random Colour.) It was very nice indeed. Ceri delivered two bags of cotton pencil roving that Meallanmouse had ordered for me to dye and spin up for her, and Jan brought me the pound of merino/mohair blended fibre that I’d arranged to buy from Finney Creek near Alexandria… and she bought another pound for me to spin up for her at some point as well! So I’m pretty set for spinning, at least for the next little while. We followed the crafting up with a delicious lunch of homemade pumpkin-apple soup and freshly baked rolls, and topped it off with Schadenfreude pie. Lunch was a bit later than I’d expected (this happens when you do not watch a clock) and by the time I’d dropped everyone off and gotten home, instead of having an hour to myself I had only fifteen minutes to change, grab my cello and music bag, and leave again for my monthly group cello class. Fortunately HRH agreed to drop me off and go grocery shopping with the boy while I played, so I had an extra fifteen minutes to sit and relax before we all headed out (and as a bonus, we actually got groceries this weekend!). Group class was very enjoyable, as usual. We worked on our ensemble pieces for the upcoming Christmas recital, which are going okay. We had an interesting non-teacher-initiated chat at the end about how when things sound wrong we all automatically think we’re the ones in error instead of trusting ourselves. It’s not an isolated thing. We have another group class next Sunday, as the recital happens in three weeks and we’ve only had two group rehearsals so far. M and I have a coached duet lesson together on Wednesday night, and then I have my regular lesson on Friday evening. With a week off from orchestra, now I can really focus on my lesson and recital pieces and not feel like I’m losing ground in my other music.

In Which She Dines Out And Enlarges Her Fibre Stash

Well, actually, not really. It’s not stash, it’s test samples and gift stuff.

I met MLG for lunch, and HRH came along (he was home from work, unwell; he dropped me off and was intending to go get the winter tires put on the car, a low-energy endeavour which would consist of sitting and drinking coffee while someone else switched the tires on the rims, but got dragged into lunch instead). We had a lovely time. I had a very good French onion soup and a cider, excellent on a chilly, damp, rainy day. HRH then dropped me off at Ariadne Knits on his way to the garage. I knocked around the yarn store for about forty-five minutes, sorting through all the lovely tiny sample packs of spinning fibre they put together. I did come close to buying a big multi-fibre sampler kit, but stuck with my single-ounce servings of soy silk, Tussah silk, and bamboo, as those are what I’m interested in at the moment. The big sampler kit had things like Falkland, alpaca, mohair, and flax apart from the silks; all things I’ll try someday, but not now. Right now, I am all about the soft silky stuff. I also picked up some special stuff to spin up for a Yule gift, ordered the oatmeal Blue-Face Leicester for Ceri’s sweater, a half-pound of Tencel, and I tried to order a half-pound of merino/silk blend but MA found a listing for Louet’s new BFL/silk blend (oooh, BFL and silk! dreamy!); it was only four dollars more per half-pound (although not yet officially in stock in the warehouse) so I ordered a bag of that instead. And I ordered my high-speed bobbin, too. “Do you want me to pre-pay all that, or leave you a deposit?” I said. “Nah,” said MA. “I know where to find you. Also, I know who your friends are.”

And now I know that it’s only forty minutes to get to my LYS via bus and metro, so on days where I can’t stand to be at home any longer for the cabin fever I can pick up and go knit there.

Speaking of knitting, I cast on my goddaughter’s Yule wrap on Wednesday, and I’ve got a quarter of it finished. It’s a good thing she’s not adult-sized, because I’m not going to have enough yarn to do a full sixteen repeats of the pattern; I’ll probably manage twelve. In which case I’m actually a third finished. I’m annoyed but not overly fussed, because if I really need more yarn? I’ll just spin some. Ha. (Irony: If I’d gone with a two-ply yarn instead of chain-plied, I’d have had a bit more yardage.)

And to top off my excellent day, my freelance coordinator e-mailed me to say that my missing freelance cheque had been returned to them, and they were sending it out with next week’s cheques. Hurrah! Also, the reason I only had one project in the past two weeks was because there was a lull and there were no projects available. This actually tied in decently with my fibro crash last week. And with the missing cheque being mailed along with the cheque for the single assignment I did in the past two weeks, it will feel like a Real Paycheque after all.

Dress rehearsal tonight! I am reminding myself to wear two layers of everything, because the church was freaking cold on Wednesday night. They turn the heat on for concerts, but rehearsals are chilly undertakings.

Backdated Posts

Finally written and posted:

The weekend roundup.

The boy’s fifty-three months old post.

And now I have crossed everything off today’s to-do list except laundry. The bread’s on its second rise, and I have some cello to work on. Last night’s rehearsal was amazing but incredibly draining; with the fibro being the worst it’s been in two years, I’m moderately concerned about keeling over halfway through the second part of the concert on Saturday night, and no, I am not kidding. I think what will save me is that fact that the Beethoven is at the end on the actual concert night.

Cast on Devon’s wrap yesterday, and got two of the sixteen repeats done. I have to keep reminding myself that blocking opens up the lace. Because the yarn is thicker but I didn’t change needle size, it’s not open lace like the original. We’ll see what happens.

Monday

I know. I haven’t finished the boy’s monthly update, nor have I done the weekend roundup. They’re both energy-intensive, as was the weekend, and I don’t have any energy to spare at the moment. I worked all yesterday morning on a freelance assignment that was returned to me at the end of the day for revising (first time that’s happened to me in two years of working with this company) and then worked three hours on drafting a ritual that just about wiped me out from the amount of research and arranging and things like that. So, not so much with the journaling.

I finished Gran’s scarf on Sunday, though, and will share pictures with you:

As you can see, the striping was a bit more pronounced than I wanted it to be. (Note to self: Next time you want just a tiny bit of colour to show up here and there, spin the yarn first then dye just a spot or two instead of dyeing the fibre that then gets drafted and stretched out to cover even more area than you dyed.) The cast-on edge is a bit loose; I’m going to crochet a row or two along the edge to firm it up today.

So I overdyed it. I laid it out and used a squeeze bottle to apply a weak solution of the paler yellow dye (deliberately unevenly, thank you) to the white parts. This made for an overall variegated yellow scarf with touches of cream instead of a cream one with pale touches of yellow, but I’ll take it. It’s just kind of the photo negative of what I had originally planned. (This photo makes it look a bit green, but it’s not. It’s the colour of daffodils.)

In other non-related news, major library score last night: three new releases on my to-read list I didn’t know the library was even going to acquire (The Blythes are Quoted and The White Garden among them), two Kate Jacobs books, Frostbitten by Kelley Armstrong, and the copy of A Forest of Hands and Teeth was actually on the shelf where it was supposed to be. I am a very happy reader.

Weekend Roundup

On Friday I went to see the MMFA Waterhouse exhibit with a friend who must remain nameless in this public post due to the Preservation of Family Harmony Act (as in, if someone found out this friend had seen the exhibit first with someone other than the someone in question, family life would no longer be harmonious). Gorgeous, gorgeous colours. Reproductions don’t even come close to capturing the glow of these works. And the design and layout of the exhibition was fabulous, too. You wouldn’t think matte black wallk and black text with black velvet would work, but it makes the paintings glow even more. We saw details we’d never seen before. I was highly amused to see that Waterhouse doodled in the books he was reading. Then we browsed through the museum gift shop (we should not be allowed into museum gift shops unsupervised) where I picked up a Christmas ornament and some of the Bleu Lavande lip balm, remembering that Meallanmouse had recommended it (and justly, too, wow). And then we went off to have expensive coffees with lots of whipped cream. The weather was glorious, too, making it an all-round perfect day. It felt so good to dress up a bit (brown patterned stockings! a skirt! my Italian leather ankle boots that I don’t wear nearly enough to justify the money my mother spent on them so many years ago!) and go outside.

Saturday morning was a very productive cello lesson. Late Saturday afternoon was Tarasmas. I wish I had the energy to describe it, but suffice it to say that there were two very clever plays that parodied four popular themes or plots, tonnes of talented people reading from scripts they’d never seen before, the triumphant return of Action Woman, and a fully-realized and orchestrated Action Woman theme that later served as the musical line for an audience singalong. I got to play a Russian spy in the vampire/spy play, which absolutely delighted me. We retired to Mackay’s nearby abode for post-play social interaction but the boy had been up a few times the night before and I was wiped. We went home earlier than we wanted to.

Sunday HRH and the boy replaced the officially dead doorbells, and HRH put the plastic up on the windows, thereby cutting the condensation problem in half immediately. I’m still taking about six cups of water out of the air daily with the dehumidifier, but it’s made a huge difference already. I also finished Gran’s scarf, which you can see here, and there was a long overdyeing process that took up a lot of the day. For dinner I did a stupendously delicious pork roast.

Doing weekend roundups late means I get the bare bones down, but not the nuances. Sigh.