Category Archives: Diary

Meet the Mazurka

Among the work, and the starting school, and the work, and the preschool stuff, and the work…

I got a new wheel.

But you just SOLD one! I hear some of you cry. Yes, I did. I sold the Baynes castle wheel I got in May 2013 to Cats this past Easter. And then I discovered that I really missed having a small upright I could move around with me. This was painfully obvious in August when I had the kids home full-time and had to be downstairs with Owlet if she was watching a movie and Sparky didn’t want to. I have to be doing something with my hands, apparently, and knitting doesn’t fully work in that respect because I need undivided attention to knit. And this summer also demonstrated to me that spindles are nice, but frustrating in their slowness and their physical requirements. (I’m looking into supported spindles to combat that latter issue; we’ll see what happens.)

This summer my fellow spinners and I in the Kromski group at Ravelry got into discussing the very first spinning wheel produced by Kromski, pre-1999. We tend to call it the Mazurka prototype, because the design was overhauled and then presented as their first mass-production spinning wheel, the Mazurka. It’s a single-treadle, double-drive castle wheel. The prototype has a different flyer and bobbin, but it’s fully operational. You just can’t use the modern bobbins. (FWIW, the redesigned Mazurka was retired in 2011 and is out of production.)

We were trying to problem solve for a spinner who owned one, and whose flyer had broken in two. Now, it’s not generally a good idea to repair a broken flyer; a repaired wooden unit revolving at high speed under tension runs the risk of becoming a dangerous high-speed projectile (with pointy hooks made from nails sticking out!). We started trying to figure out the differences between the old and the new Mazurkas, and got measurements of the new flyers, trying to figure out if they’d fit on the prototype’s mother-of-all (for reference, if you’re a collector looking to upgrade your prototype: they won’t fit at all; the new flyers are almost two inches longer than the prototype’s flyer, and the clearance between the shaft and the arms is different, too. Also, modern whorls won’t fit because the threaded part on the prototype’s shaft is too short to allow the modern double whorls to screw fully on. You’re welcome.) And as we asked questions of one another, someone in the Netherlands popped up and said she had a prototype, and didn’t use it; she was willing to sell it, and at a ridiculously low price.

Well, yes, of course I was interested. I gave someone in the UK first rights of refusal, and then started negotiating. We were both busy, and I was waiting on one of the freelance cheques for a crazy project I’d done in late spring. She was worried I’d balk at the cost of shipping, but as others in the group agreed, her price for the wheel was so low that even taking international shipping of a spinning-wheel-shaped object into account, it was an awesome deal.

So then my cheque was late, and the safest and cheapest way to pay her was by bank transfer so I did an international money transfer via my bank to her bank, and then there was no news about the transfer resolving at the other end, and there were health issues… but it all worked out. Then I got to track my parcel from NL to CAN, which was very exciting. And then, a day or two before I expected it, my friendly parcel guy rang my doorbell at ten in the morning and gave me this:

I couldn’t let myself open it right away, because I had so much work to do that day! I let myself open it half an hour before I had to go get the kids. So I unpacked and assembled it into this:

The first couple of days were frustrating. A couple of the hooks are a bit rough and the single would break on them. It only runs in double drive, and the difference in circumference between the bobbin groove and the whorl/pulley isn’t very big, so the take-up/draw-in wasn’t as strong as I like for the spinning I do. On a double-drive wheel, that’s adjusted via raising or lowering the entire MOA assembly to put more tension on the doubled drive band, and even moving it incrementally I couldn’t get a setting I liked. I rigged a weighted line scotch brake to run over the bobbin groove to spin in single drive/scotch tension, but even that ended up being frustrating. I finally changed the drive band from the fuzzy hemp to the nice waxed cotton I bought to replace the drive band on my Symphony, and everything clicked.

She doesn’t have a maker’s mark, which is a bit disappointing, but not unexpected; in the five-ish wheels from our discussion board sample, only one does. She has a distaff, which is exciting; I’ve never had a wheel with a distaff before. I was excited for one afternoon, after which I took it off, since it was in the way of replacing drive and brake bands and going up and down stairs with it. And it’s so light! I can carry it around with a couple of fingers of one hand! The Baynes was much heavier.

Now, having been deep in discussion about other people’s Mazurka prototypes, I was already in the right headspace to carry on thinking about updating this one so that I could switch bobbins between the two Kromski wheels. HRH took a good look at the mother of all, and comparing my modern flyer from the Symphony with it, we could see that it would be too short. So I’ve ordered a modern unfinished flyer and front maiden, and HRH is working on a cap for the current MOA to extend it. It would be difficult to replace it entirely, because the MOA has a threaded hole at the back for the wooden tension screw that raises or lowers it. Reproducing that threaded wooden hole to match the screw would be harder to do, and HRH doesn’t have the tools to do it. And since it will accept the new double flyer whorls, I can use my extra Symphony ones. I’ll put in some eye hooks for a proper scotch tension brake, too.

She is quite charming, and I like her very much, even before the upgrade. I’m currently spinning dark green Corriedale top on her to make a worsted yarn to knit Sparky a Link hat.

Owlet: 37 Months Old!

Owlet has decided that all dresses and long skirts are called ‘ballets.’ “I like your ballet!” she says to anyone in a dress. “Noooo, I want to wear my butterfly ballet!” she says when we offer her any of her dresses. (The butterfly ballet is actually this dress with flowers on it. Preschooler language; you learn it or you die.)

Her favourite books are Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies and William Mayne’s The Patchwork Cat. Her favourite movie is now Despicable Me 2, or “minions” in preschooler-speak.

She has just begun her four days a week at preschool, after a month off. For the past couple of weeks she’s been having two play dates there per week, arriving after snack and playing till lunch, participating in circle time and some games. There was water play on the really nice days. It got to a point where the kids would see us through the windows as we were walking up, and start shouting that “Bee” was here, with great excitement. (Apparently that nickname arises spontaneously elsewhere, which is amusing because it’s one of our little nicknames for her within the family, too.) The play date time was open to all the kids and mums who were going to be merging into the big daycare, but Owlet was the only one who made it to all four. (The educator tells me that Owlet had the least trouble merging into the routine in the first week, and credits her attendance at the play dates for it.) I sat with whatever mum had come with her kid that day and watched everyone play. It was hard but interesting to watch her be shy, to try to fit herself into the games being played by children who’d known each other for a year or more, or who knew her but knew their immediate playmates better. It’s a new dynamic; she has to figure out how she fits in, and then the group dynamic has to resettle as well.

We got her a new My Little Pony backpack, and there was a little coil-bound coloring kit we got at the same time, which she calls her “schedule.” She wore the backpack out of the store very proudly, and as soon as she got out of the car at home she sat down on the driveway and opened it to find “my schedule, Mummy, I have to check my schedule.”

Chalk is her newest big obsession. We picked up some packs of big, soft play chalk one day in August, and we didn’t even get inside the house before both kids wanted to tear open the packaging and start drawing on the driveway. Owlet is very into drawing legs on things that I draw for her, long spindly legs that sometimes aren’t attached to the body of whatever owns them. Or even attached to things that usually don’t have them, like apples.

I had the brilliant idea of bringing the easel up from downstairs and setting it up in the enclosed side porch right next to the kitchen so she’d have an art station up here instead of having to set something up on the kitchen table every time. I bought a new roll of art paper, too, so now when she wants to draw or paint, she can sit right there and do it. It should be good through the winter; HRH just has a bit more weatherizing to do to prevent the occasional snow drift, and the plank floor will be covered with foam squares to cut the cold air from seeping up as well.

On that chalkboard she drew the first thing that actually really looks like what she said it was. “Look, I drawed a fish!” she said, and yes, she really did. The eyes and the head are in the upper left, and it swoops around and down, with the tail at the bottom centre:

(We don’t know exactly why there is an unhappy face inside the fish. That part of the narrative was not shared with us. But we can make some pretty informed guesses.)

Other new things include Popsicles, tacos (we never thought those would fly, but we are so very wrong), learning to rinse and spit with her new toothpaste, having her fingernails painted with polish for the first time, and discovering Wonder Woman thanks to Ceri, Scott, and Ada gifting her with a Wonder Woman-themed birthday present.

Recently she’s really gotten into developing and telling stories, constructing little narratives. Most recently there have been things like, “It’s so dark. It is night? Where are the spirits? Some are sleeping, and some go to the bathhouse. There is a spirit who wanted to go to the bathhouse but didn’t know how to get there, so he jumped, like a rabbit, and he turned into a rabbit, and hop hop hopped to the bathhouse.” (That’s a blend of Miyazaki’s film Spirited Away and her own little story about a spirit.)

The other odd thing is her insistence that everything is named “Dead.” At first we thought she was mangling the pronunciation of Jed, or Deb, or Jen… but no. “I see a dog! It’s name is Dead.” It’s mildly disturbing if we think about it too long and try to read too much into it, but it’s just a word to her. She’s too busy to take into account her parent’s weird hangups. There’s dancing to do.

Sparky, September 2014

Grade four has begun ( know, I know, I sense your mild panic, me too). His best friend isn’t in his class, but a couple of his other buddies are, so it’s all okay. Apparently now that they are in grade four, they no longer have ‘playdates,’ they ‘hang out,’ and they don’t ‘play’ at recess, they ‘chill.’ Good to have all the correct lingo established already.

He likes both his French and his English teachers, and his homeroom teacher is his French teacher. Instead of having everything in French (except his English classes) for the first half of the year and then switching to all English (except for French classes) for the last half of the year, this year they are doing 50/50 all the way through. Apparently a parent complained that they thought English was being short-changed last year (what? seriously? did this parent not do the math?), so it’s being done this way. Whatever.

The kids don’t have their agendas yet, as there was a printing error (oops), but they should be in by the end of this week. They’re slipping easily into homework by reviewing last year’s concepts. I was too burnt out and lacking in the energy necessary to deal with 200+ strangers at meet-the-teacher night, so HRH went, bless him. The list of chapter books they’re reading in English is terrific, and the units of discovery they have set are exciting! For example, one is theatre from classical antiquity through the Renaissance! Sparky’s as excited about that one as I am. Apparently part of this unit is music/art history/dance exploration of the associated eras, so how cool is that?

You may remember his appeal to drop cello at the end of last season. I revisited the topic a couple of times casually throughout the summer. The first round of the cello conversation went like this:

Me: I think we need to talk about why you’d like to stop entirely or take a longer break than just the summer.
Sparky: Well, I don’t like doing lessons on weekends. I want to spend time with everyone in the family, not just you.
Me: Well, that’s a good reason. We could do lessons on Friday nights, and switch our family board game night to Saturdays.
Sparky: OH, NO. We are *not* switching game night! We can stick with doing lessons on weekends. *runs off*
Me: Um… okay.

My Twitter comment at the time was: “So… I think that’s resolved? Kind of? I’ll check again tomorrow.”

A week later I sat down with him and explained that I had overlooked something. While I accept that I have to sit through his lessons and his half of the group class because I’m his parent, it’s kind of unfair to expect him to have to sit through my lesson and my half of the group class, too. That extra time plus the 45-minute commute before and after means that on weekends where we do a lesson and a group class, he’s losing two whole half-days out of his weekend. And you know, he’s nine, and he has his own stuff he wants to do. So while he considered various options (like a local teacher for him so he wouldn’t lose so much of his weekend time to waiting through my lesson and my group class) he ended up deciding that no, he really wanted to step away for a while. Okay, I said, but he would have to come to our first scheduled lesson of the season so he could discuss it with our teacher, as she might have some valuable observations and input.

I was so proud of him. He didn’t crumple in on himself or try to hide; he sat straight and explained that he thought he’d like to try something else for a while, thank you, hopefully some art classes. And my teacher handled it beautifully, being so supportive, telling him that he had music in his heart and only asking that he not ignore his cello, to pick it up and just mess around with it for fun, and giving him a hug. At that point he had to excuse himself to go to the bathroom, blinking furiously. So there we are.

He has already asked to do some drawing, painting, and sculpture instead, and our local arts centre (who runs the summer camp he did for two years) offers exactly that course for nine to twelve-year-olds, at a very affordable price. And they even allow mid-session registration, which I’m assuming we’ll need by this point. So I’ll be following up on that this week.

And this also means I get cello back to myself. It’s been fun sharing it with him, but now my time spent at lessons and classes is now only my own, too. And I can go back to weekly lessons, since I’ll be able to afford it, even taking his art lessons into account. It looks like everyone wins.

In Which the Summer Comes to an End

Hmm. I found this draft in my folder today. It’s three weeks out of date, but should be posted anyway. I’ll follow it up with the resolution below.

Yesterday, I was two days away from handing in this staggeringly large project, a project twice as long as most, done within the same time frame. Except I lost four days at the beginning because HRH was away, so instead of meeting my 45-page quota, I did maybe 30 pages total before he got home, and so my daily quotas had to be reworked until I had to pull off crazy numbers per day.

In two weeks, both the kids will be back at school/preschool full time. (Or as full time as Owlet gets, who is actually part time, having Wednesdays off.) Yesterday, I was looking forward to racing to the end of this project, of handing it in, of having the last couple of weeks off with the kids, who have been struggling but handling things relatively well this past month with both of them home and me working full time.

And then yesterday, work contacted me, and asked if I could pick up another project as soon as I handed this one in. Two week deadline. Math, of all things.

I cried, a bit. Freelancing means working when there is work and socking away the money, because when there is no work there is no money coming in. Kids don’t understand that. Sparky burst into tears when I told him and had to close his bedroom door and wail for a while.

It has been a frustrating summer. Working full time at home with both kids off school is like taking your kids into work with you every day. Think about that. Everyone’s tempers are very short, there is lots of whining, and my productivity is taking a severe hit.

I had to take it. Work has happy — my copy chief said that I’d saved them, which was nice to hear, but wouldn’t mean much to my kids.

My kids rose to the occasion, though, and allowing them liberal movie time plus working at night and overtime on Labour Day weekend meant that everything turned out okay. I’d finished Sparky’s back-to-school shopping in July (allow me to pat myself on the back here) so that wasn’t an issue. I handed the math book in on time, and decided to book off a few days, because as much as a freelancer has to make hay while the sun shines, I have been going nonstop since May. Summer is the busy season in publishing, and I was handling enormous projects with lots of details. It’s nice to know I’m valued for these particular kinds of manuscripts, but I had three in a row, and I was, honestly, burnt out. I also need to prep a four-hour workshop for this coming Saturday at Sacred Cauldron, and with my reduced brain cells, there was no way I could juggle that plus a heavy assignment again. Fortunately, there’s a lull, so I haven’t had to formally book off.

One of the huge cheques from a crazy project I did in July came in, so I treated myself to some books and some fibre, as well as a pair of hand carders. The problem is, I’ve been going full-bore for so long that even though a lovely stack of books is waiting, I keep drifting around with a work hangover, vaguely thinking there is something with a deadline I need to do first.

We did it; we survived August, a crazy, crazy month, with me working full-time at home with both kids home full-time, too. I am putting money aside every paycheque now to make sure Sparky can go to camp next summer. Not that it will be as terrible, because Owlet won’t have a break from preschool like she did this summer because her daycare closed at the end of July and her slot in the new daycare didn’t open till after Labour Day; she goes straight through.

General Update

Let’s use a numbered list! Those are fun!

1. We are settling in nicely with the Cruze. It is still red. HRH drove it to Pennsylvania and back last weekend for Clan Camping, and apparently it handled like a dream. We’re getting insanely good gas mileage. I think, apart from the trip to PA (where they also filled up a lot less than expected), we have put gas in the car all of twice, neither a full tank.

2. I am currently copyediting a 600-page, 300-recipe French cookbook. This has had three major effects so far: One, I want to slow cook everything (as I said the other day to Daphne and Ceri, “mijoter TOUTES LES VIANDES!”); two, my desire to drink wine has increased proportionally to the direction to pour wine in every second recipe; and three, my desire to cook everything in butter has also increased. It is a pretty tight schedule, since it’s about twice the length of a standard manuscript but I have the same timeframe in which to complete it. HRH is back at work so my daytime work hours are reduced with both kids home, which doesn’t help with the stress levels. But I am in the home stretch, with less than 100 pages to go before my deadline this week.

3. I registered for this year’s Spinzilla, spinning for Team Kromski. This is a week-long event hosted by the TNNA (AKA The National Needlearts Association, specifically the Spinning and Weaving Group) designed “to motivate spinners to learn new skills, take risks, and spin their hearts out. It is also a fundraiser for the NeedleArts Mentoring Program (NAMP). NAMP connects adult mentors with school age children to teach the needle arts — spinning, weaving, knitting, crochet, and stitching.” The basic goal is for teams try to spin as much combined length as they can. Plied yarns count for the length of the singles used to make them. In other words, if you end up with a 300-yard three-ply yarn, it counts for 900 yards of spinning. (Turns out the plied length counts, too, because you ran it through the wheel to ply it! So a 300-yard three-ply yarn would count for 1200 yards!) This is mildly insane because Canadian Thanksgiving happens during that week, but we shall see what kind of game plan I can draw up.

4. I read The Apprentices by Maile Meloy, which is the sequel to The Apothecary. It wasn’t as good, unfortunately. I also recently read Indexing by Seanan McGuire, which was fantastic. I got my copy of Beth Smith’s Spinner’s Book of Fleece book last week, and when this project is handed in I intend to sit down and enjoy it from cover to cover.

5. I will also enjoy trying out my new hand cards after this project is done!

I got paid for a crazy project I did a month and a half ago (recently it has been all huge or crazy projects, which is good for the bank account, not so good for the stress levels) and I took some of that money and bought a pair from Colette at her spinning studio. I also picked up some pink and purple Corriedale that Owlet fell in love with, so I shall practice carding by blending some Tencel with each of them and knitting her wee socks and mittens.

6. I forgot to mention that HRH painted the bathroom at the end of July. I came home from a week with my parents and the shabbiness of it finally made me snap. He scraped off the white paint on the wall soap dish (who paints a soap dish?), replaced the soggy MDF shelf above the sink, and painted the dark grey walls a lovely spring green. I love it so much more.

7. I bought a new computer monitor on sale a week or so ago. It’s a 20″, and it is astonishing. I can easily have three or four documents open on my screen and flip through all of them easily. I have no idea how I survived with a 15″ for so long.

That’s life in a nutshell right about now.

Random List of Updatey Stuff

Last week, we traded our beloved Saturn Vue in for a Chevy Cruze. We were almost convinced (the gas economy on the Vue was worse than abysmal, even taking into account the size of the engine and the age of the vehicle), pending my test drive and agreement, when the Vue’s transmission decided to stop functioning on our trip to southern Ontario. Six hundred kilometers from home is not where you want these things to happen. Fortunately, when we’d taken the loan out on the Vue we’d bought an extra insurance for it via the dealer that covered exactly this kind of thing, so HRH called them, they sent him across Toronto to the garage they dealt with, and they handled it beautifully. We paid the $83 dollar deductible plus the cost of the diagnostic test; the insurer paid absolutely everything else, no fuss, no arguing. We’re so impressed that once the manufacturer’s warranty runs out on the Cruze, we’ll be buying this package again. But the whole experience made us very cranky at the Vue, and also at the timing. It was kind of the final straw; we felt a bit betrayed.

So yes, we have a new car. It is red, which is not among my favourite colours for cars, but of all the reds it could be it is the most acceptable. We have had it for six days and the fuel economy is so awesome that I swear little angels sing to me every time I check the tank gauge. It is lovely to drive, but I miss my Vue terribly.

This is Owlet’s last week of daycare. She will be home through all of August. I can’t help but feel that I should be doing something very productive with my time as it ticks away before this Friday afternoon, but instead I am sort of stumbling around, recovering from my month and a half of going at full speed. I handled two intense work projects back to back, and then I turned around a ten-day project in four days just before we left on our trip. (Possibly insane, but I did it.) My allergies are really, really bad this summer for some reason, too, so bad that they’ve triggered my asthma, which hasn’t happened in years. That’s sucking a lot of my energy. This morning I finally found an old inhaler and used it. Now I can breathe again, but I’d forgotten that Ventolin gives me the shakes. So after coming back from dropping Owlet off and doing half the back-to-school shopping with Sparky, I had to lie down on the chesterfield with a blanket because I couldn’t do much else. Fibro backlash plus a not-so-great reaction to medication; charming.

I am trying not to worry about August, when both kids will be home full time. It’s hard enough to get Sparky to stop whining that he doesn’t know what to do, and to keep my temper when he shoots down every suggestion I have for him. I’m trying to gear up for having them both here, and for the fact that I will have to work nights and weekends if I get a contract. We can go grocery shopping every couple of days, go for walks, find a local playground, and play in the backyard (maybe fill the pools if the temperature gets warm enough again for water play). The age gap makes it problematic at times. Owlet’s idea of a walk is to the end of the street and back, stopping to crouch and examine leaves, bugs, and flowers, or stomp in puddles if it has rained; Sparky gets frustrated because we’re not getting anywhere. She’s not old enough to play Lego with him; he’s not young enough to let her direct the play if they bring out the Thomas trains or the cars or whatever, getting upset if she deviates from the complicated game he sets up. The age difference between nine and three is really big.

Craft stuff is going to be what I turn to a lot of the time, I think. I’d like to have a defined craft time every day. I’ll pick up pads at the dollar store for Owlet, and some canvases for Sparky. I think he may find working with acrylics on canvas interesting. We can do some plasticine, and maybe some homemade air-dry clay that can be painted on a subsequent day. I’ll get a bucket of chalk to draw on the top part of the driveway. Owlet is old enough for bigger beads, as well; we can make necklaces, bracelets, and maybe ornaments for trees. And I’ll certainly make a calendar that we can use to count down the days till school starts again. I know she’ll miss her friends and her educators terribly. Unfortunately, most of them planned to go on vacation for the first half of August, so we can’t even plan playdates till they’re back; but once they are, then that will help, too.

Tour de Fleece 2014

The Tour de Fleece is a fun spinning thing that takes place concurrently with the Tour de France. The goal is to challenge yourself as a spinner.

While we have a cosy little spinning thread within my online mums group, I’m most active in the Kromski TdF team on Ravelry, as my wheel is a Kromski Symphony. And I (possibly foolishly) volunteered to co-captain this year, which consisted mostly of cheerleading, helping keep track of members, and prizes. We had over a hundred spinners on this team, and the photos being posted of in-progress work were so inspiring!

This year, my main goal was to try beaded yarn. My secondary goal was to try a 60/40 wool/flax blend, as I’d never spun flax in any form before. (This ended up being on a spindle, so it was even more of a challenge than I’d originally set for myself.)

I’d intended to finish the ‘Maid in Bedlam’ merino/silk before the TdF to free up my bobbins, but two back-to-back crazy projects for work meant I wasn’t even through the first half of it when the Tour began. (Worsted tends to be a more time-consuming technique; just for comparison, I spun the last two ounces of my merino/bamboo yarn below in less than a day.) So that became my first project, and I joined the very cheerful Daybreak Dyeworks team as well (the fibre had come from Daybreak Dyeworks, as part of their one-off Sip’n’Spin tea and fibre event). There’s no limit to the number of teams you can join, but each team might have different rules. For example, a dyer-hosted group may stipulate that only fibre produced by that dyer qualifies for a Tour project within their group. Team Kromski stipulates that your primary equipment for the Tour must be your Kromski wheel and that you must have fun, but other than that anything goes. So my Maid in Bedlam yarn qualified for both the Daybreak Dyeworks group and Team Kromski.

I finished the Maid in Bedlam fibre a week into the Tour. It felt like it was going to take forever, and with good reason: plied, it was about 20 WPI, or laceweight, and winding it off took a couple of evenings because it was about 680 yards long!

I know it looks like a gradient, but it isn’t! It just worked out that way. I separated the fiber halfway down and just spun each half across the top as it came. The plying did the rest. My friend Stephanie suggested that I knit the Bella Botanica shawl with it, and that sounds like a good idea. The pattern is charted, which is slightly eek-inducing for me, but the first part of the shawl is both written and charted to ease a first-timer into it.

In theory, up next was my attempt at beaded yarn, but I couldn’t face a second silky laceweight yarn; I needed a palate cleanser. So I brought out a braid of my friend Jenn’s alpaca and decided to do a fluffy three-ply yarn.

This was her ‘Nebula’ colourway (how could I pass that up?) and rather than being three solid strands of fibre braided together, each strand was actually made up of smaller pencil roving. The brown strand was all brown, the blue strand had minor variegation, and the multicolour strand was blues and purples and greens and creams and oranges. I ended up doing a bit of each separate colour at a time so there were a lot of colour changes instead of one long strip of yellow, one long strip of lavender, and so forth. I think how Jenn assembled it is really cool; it’s something I never would have thought of doing, and it challenged my colour sense. I decided to spin each one as its own single then ply them together for a three-ply yarn, because I really liked the effect in the braid and I wanted to preserve it. While plying, I ran out of brown single, quickly spun up some more from a brown alpaca sample I had buried in my stash from somewhere else, then ran out of it *again*. I chain-plied the last bit of blue then the multicolour single.

I ended up with 204 yards of three-ply yarn, plus 12 yards of chain-plied leftovers. All so soft! I want fingerless gloves made out of this.

Just before the Tour began I dyed some merino/bamboo fibre in a pretty pewter/pearly silver colour:

I also picked up some beads from Michael’s, and a beading needle. I wanted to actually spin the beads into the singles, not string them on a thread and ply the beads on. (That sounds a bit like cheating to me.) In the mornings before taking Owlet to daycare I’d make little tufts of merino/bamboo and thread tiny clear beads onto them. I wanted a pile at hand so I could grab one, lay it over the single I was spinning, and spin the tuft and the bead right into the single. I also made fauxlags (rolags made from commercial top instead of hand cards), because I wanted as lofty a yarn as possible. I am aiming for about a DK weight or slightly lighter, with an eye to having the yarn for Swinging Triangles shawl.

It all went splendidly for the first bobbin, which is where I had to stop before our trip to Ontario. The tiny beads are clear and don’t show up in photos very well, which is a bit disappointing. But it’s also good, because I wanted to overall effect to be subtle in the final yarn and the shawl it will be knit from.

I’m a little cross that you can’t see the beads, but as I chose clear ones to be really subtle in the final yarn, and ultimately in the shawl when it’s knitted, well… I guess this means it worked?

As a challenge, I took my Kundert spindle and two ounces of 60/40 wool/flax blend on our trip. I’m rather meh about the blend. I couldn’t quite get a handle on it, which is probably the flax, but is very possibly my paucity of spindle experience. When I got home I plied what I had on the spindle and ended up with 22 yards of yarn. It improved considerably the more I handled it, which is in line (heh, see what I did there? no? never mind) with what I know of flax.

I also got to spin the second half of the merino/bamboo with beads, then ply the two bobbins together. Ta-da! 501 yards of beautifully soft and silky beaded yarn! I am short about 150 yards for the shawl I want to knit with it, but the beauty of dyeing my own is that I can just make more.

I am very, very happy with my performance this Tour.