Category Archives: Knitting, Spinning, & Weaving

Stuff I Did In 2013

Wow. Busy year.

Knitted two and a half pairs of socks. No, actually, if we’re adding up individual socks I knit three full pairs, because I knit three for Sparky’s Gryffindor socks, two for my slipper socks, and one so far for my own pair of regular socks. Ha ha! Six socks! (Too bad that’s not how it actually works. Sigh.)

I knit a complete child’s pullover sweater. How crazy is that. It was also my first test knit for someone.

I knit one and a half cap-sleeve sweaters for myself. The half is because I had a half-done one languishing in my cupboard since something like 2006, I finished it, realized it wouldn’t fit, frogged it all, and reknit it. It’s technically finished, but I need to undo the bindoff and add an inch to the bottom. I should add that I made some original modifications to the neck and sleeves that actually worked. I think I’m getting this knitting thing.

I knit a lot of blanket squares for my friends in my online mums group. And then I seamed two of those blankets together and knit the borders on each from yarn spun especially for them.

I spun twelve ounces of yarn for a friend’s project. I spun a similarly crazy amount for my mother’s stunning cabled wrap, and then dyed it, too. And I wonder why I don’t have a lot to show for my spinning time this year. Most of it belongs to other people!

In other areas of my life, I switched the bread recipe I use, and I’m liking the more artisanal loaf we get from it. I also started making my own yogurt, which is a big thing because I loathe yogurt. HRH and Owlet adore it, though.

I stopped using commercial cleansers and moisturizers on my face, observing how much happier and healthier my hair and scalp were when I quit using sodium lauryl/laureth-laden shampoos and silicone-sibling conditioners, and thinking that my face would probably react in a similarly positive fashion. Turns out my face is much happier not being stripped of everything (good and bad) and then having stuff smoothed back on to rehydrate it. I’m using the oil-cleansing method, and my tricky-to-handle, acne-prone face has never been happier. So happy, in fact, that I only have to do it every two days. So yeah, colour me impressed. (Also appalled at the ruthlessly-strip-then-requires-deep-moisturizing-with-unhappy-stuff-that-needs-to-be-stripped cycle that our consumer society has tricked us into repeating endlessly.)

I cut my hair, a lot. I’m hacking off three-quarters of an inch every four to five weeks. It’s nuts. I thought a couple of times that I’d grow it longer again, but I look so tired when it’s shoulder length that snip, off it comes, and I look so much healthier and brighter with it at about chin length again.

I was pretty healthy overall, the trip to the dermatologist and his concern over one of my moles aside. (That’s being taken off and sent for analysis next June. It’s difficult to reconcile “concern” with an eight-month wait for removal and analysis, but whatever.) The other health scare that had me sent a specialist also ended up fine, so another deep sigh of relief and hurrah for that. (Also, I now have a gynaecologist who is awfully nice.) I went back on my fibro medication this summer, and after a two-month period where it felt like it wasn’t doing anything, things suddenly clicked into place and the pain is manageable and energy levels are more consistent. Sleep is less of an issue, although still a big sensitive spot for me.

I kept up with Downton Abbey and Sherlock, we discovered the My Little Pony reboot, and I dropped Game of Thrones because the level of depicted violence and sex turned me off. I know, I know; I’ve read all the books. But the way HBO is portraying it is different, and it’s not enjoyable to watch for me. And life is too short to make myself read crappy books or watch TV that I don’t enjoy. I’m getting very good at cutting stuff like that out of my life.

In fact, I’ve looked back over the past couple of years, and I’ve done a better job at releasing toxic friendships and limiting contact with people who stress me out. I have a limited amount of energy to keep myself going. I need to protect it. I’m doing a pretty good job at saying no and focusing on the most important things in my life.

I’ve done some editing work that I’m very proud of, both private and through the publisher I work with. I’ve had the privilege of reading some great stuff before its release and helping to make it even better. I love my work, even when it drives me to excessive chocolate consumption like the most recent ones did. (Oh dear gods. You will never know, because the resulting books have correct facts and dates and are stronger in general. That’s what I do, and I’m fine being anonymous.)

I didn’t have a lot of time for cello, but I seem to be doing okay in that area. Just getting out once a week and carrying through on the orchestral commitment was a priority. We played some great stuff in orchestra, and I’m proud of my Suzuki work, too.

I read much less than I usually do (hmm, I should start including the books I edit; those totally count, why do I not do that already?). Although “usually” has taken a hit these past threeish years, so maybe this new lower finished frequency is the new normal. Standouts for me were the second in Elizabeth Bear’s Steles of the Sky trilogy and Kerstin Gier’s entire Ruby Red trilogy. I finally got around to reading Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, which was lovely. And courtesy of Tamu, I got to attend Neil Gaiman’s only Montreal book signing/reading tour stop ever (it’s hard to believe, but his previous stops here have been con-related, and he retired from touring after The Ocean at the End of the Lane one ended).

Music-wise I discovered The Doubleclicks, who should adopt me, because wow, it’s like they know everything inside my head. Also, cello.

November

I am just back from DavidsTea, where I bought three teas I did not expect to buy, and none of the ones that were actually on my list to pick up. Shiny things! Let me smell them! Ooh, I’ll take 25 g of that, and 25 g of that… shopping list? What is a shopping list? You mean, this thing in my hand that’s in my way of picking things up and looking at them? This thing that reminds me of the favourite teas that I am out of or running low on?

Yeah. But I got some of the new White Chocolate Frost, so that makes up for a lot.

I am late on Owlet’s 26-month post, I am late on any kind of an October roundup, and I am sadly delinquent in any kind of note-taking here. I blame a lot of it on October, actually, which was full of deadline kitting, travel, sunshine, and back-to-back work projects. I am also delinquent on a fibro post, but here’s the essence of it: Going back on my medication seemed to be a good idea, except it didn’t do much for the first couple of months, and I began to wonder if something had changed and I needed a different kind, when suddenly everything settled and I felt better than I’d felt in a couple of years. My doctor was very pleased, told me again that she didn’t know how I’d managed everything while not taking medication, and happily extended my prescription for a year. And then November hit.

Ah yes, November. October is all sunshine and coloured leaves, and even the rainy parts are okay. It’s Thanksgiving, and it’s the smell of dusty, smoky, early decay, and it’s really nice. And then you flip the calendar page, and it’s like a huge dark wall slams down, imprisoning you in a horrid grey cell that is damp and cold, and you can never get warm, your tea goes stone-cold in half an hour, and you burst into tears because you can’t fold a bloody bed sheet properly, for goodness’ sake.

Yeah. So that’s where I am right now. I am the ‘nothing going right no matter how hard I try’ stage of things. Cello? Pointless. Reading? I can’t get into very much. Knitting? I’ve frogged the same blanket square five times this week. I’m between work projects, which is good in one way because I am pretty fried, but worrisome in another because in a month my last freelance cheque will arrive in my mailbox, and then there will only be the echoey sound of crickets in my bank account unless I land more work.

So I’m going to go make more tea, because this cup is stone-cold, and do some deadline spinning, and try to get half a blanket square knitted, because someone is having twins they only discovered were twins at 29 weeks (!), so suddenly a second blanket has to be made. It’s very nice to have hobbies when they are a rest from work, but when they become the thing you’re working on, they’re not as much fun.

Spinning And Knitting, September-October 2013

I sold some unused spinning accessories for my Baynes wheel today. (As a side note, spinners are awesome people, and as I have been the recipient of awesome spinning karma in the past, I reached out and passed some along with my offer to sell the jumbo flyer and bobbins I’ll never use for this wheel, and made a spinner very happy.) I had just finalized the price with the buyer, and the e-mail from Paypal confirming that she’d paid me arrived.

Four seconds later, the e-mail from WEBS announcing that they’re now carrying Malabrigo Nube spinning fibre lands in my inbox.

Coincidence? I THINK NOT. Curse you, WEBS. Curse you and your spying, tempty ways.

In other news, I spun stuff and dyed other stuff. Like this 325 yards of superwash merino for a somewhat secret project. Lovely, springy yarn, about a DK weight (a bit lighter than I was aiming for), spun longdraw on the Baynes Colonial upright wheel from faux rolags rolled from 4 oz of commercial SW merino top, and then chain-plied. I’ll probably have to cut my yarn when I get to the few super-thin bits you can see in the skein, remove the thin part, and reattach the thicker stuff to knit again. That can be a problem with chain-plying; it tends to magnify a variance in grist instead of evening it out, the way a true three-ply does.

And Mum’s handspun luxury yarn came out a beautiful deep autumn blaze colour; I am so very, very pleased with it. We’re still not positive it matches the original colour card, but we like the colour it ended up, so we’re counting it a success. (You can’t tell the second batch of silk/cashmere was a buff instead of white at all.) I can’t tell you how hard it is to photograph this colour. It doesn’t help that the fiber content is about half silk, which messes with light reflection. The true colour is somewhere between the two photos.

In the knitting column, I am knitting socks, my first really real socks for me, using the sock yarn Elina sent me in the summer of 2012, and they are looking like real socks so far. I wibbled about switching to stockinette, because I was tired of ribbing but I like the socks Elizabeth knitted for me last December, and they’re ribbed all the way down to just about to the ankle. I had two inches of ribbing, and figured any more would make me snap somewhere along the line, so I switched to stockinette. Except… I should have kept ribbing them, as much as I hate ribbing. Plain stockinette is not as quick as I remember it being (when did I get quicker at doing 2×2 rib?) and I prefer how the variegated yarn looks in the ribbing over the plain stockinette. Bah. Also, these pretty DPNs are teeny and I am bending them as I knit; I’m worried I’ll snap one, and sure, I have an extra, but still. And I need to loosen up my knitting, because I am so tense when I use these teeny needles, and the stitches are too tight. Meow, meow, meow.

Anyway, pretty socks, about a week ago; I have about 2.5 inches of stockinette knitted now:

And I have a shawl problem. I have a lovely shawl pattern, but no yarn for it yet. And I have handspun yarn for shawls, among them this one, but can’t decide on patterns for them. Finally, I have yarn I spun for a shawlette, the pattern for it, and am paralyzed because I don’t think it will look very good in that pattern after all. I give up.

And as a bonus, I am getting the itch to weave again,which entails emptying an awful lot out of Owlet’s cupboard to drag the loom out from under the stairs. I have no idea what I want to make; I just want to be weaving. Because I have so much spare time, of course, and nothing to fill it with.

Balance

Balance is what I’m trying to maintain. I have had so many ups and downs this past month or so.

About three weeks ago the car started sounding throatier. It went from ‘somewhat throaty’ to Yikes That Sounds Expensive two weeks ago when Sparky and I were coming home from the doctor. HRH dug about under the car and discovered that the flex joint that connected the exhaust system to the engine had rotted through, so I was essentially driving a car with no muffler, despite the fact that there was a lovely, healthy muffler system there. It was a fix HRH couldn’t do, so it had to go to the car doctor last Thursday morning. This was the most recent in a series of small things going wrong with the car. We paid it off this past spring, and we wanted to get through the winter with it before looking at a slightly larger car. If this pattern continued, I wasn’t going to feel comfortable trusting the car over the winter. It was ten years old, and there was nothing immediately wrong with it apart from the fact that things were starting to wear out, and constantly replacing them and not knowing how much it was going to be was stressful. We’d rather get a new-to-us car and know that a set fifty dollars a week is going to pay it off. So we started researching cars in earnest instead of idly, as we’d been doing for a few months.

I had Thursday off since my deadline had been Wednesday night, and HRH booked the day off work to take the car in to the garage. Right next door to our garage is the used car dealership that we’ve dealt with forever. And they had two SUV/crossover cars in stock that we’d been researching for the past few months. So we got to go kind-of car shopping together and take test drives! Part of me just wanted to trade the current one in right then before something else happened to decrease its value any further, and drive home in a new-to-us Saturn Vue or Dodge Journey. Well, we tested the Vue first, and we liked it so much that we only took the Journey out to confirm how much we liked the Vue. (The huge blind spots in the Journey were dreadful, and the engine just wasn’t big enough to haul the weight of the vehicle around without straining — no, thank you.) We sat down with the salesman and we discussed options and trade-in value, and we ended up deciding to buy it, doing the pre-sale paperwork right there. The Ion wouldn’t be ready before we had to leave to pick up the kids — the job was bigger than the garage had initially thought, which made us a bit anxious about the cost — so the dealership gave us a loaner car, and we agreed to pick up the new car Saturday morning.

Saturday morning came, and we took the whole family over to pick up the new car. And we discovered that the garage had comped the job on the Ion. Hadn’t we traded it in, the garage manager said? So it wasn’t our problem. Happy new car. We were completely blown away and are now trying to figure out a way to give both the dealers and the garage guy a treat to say thank you.

New car!

We took it over to Grandma and Papa’s house to show it to them and have lunch together. The next day we took it out on its first road trip, to spend the day at Upper Canada Village with t! and Jan. It was a lovely day, despite the chill and the showers and the lack of a real nap on Owlet’s part.

And another joy is that the first accelerated government payment for Owlet’s daycare tax credit came in last week. Here in Quebec we have 7$ a day subsidized daycare, and if you’re in a private non-subsidized daycare you can apply for a monthly refund for a portion of your costs, calculated using the cost of the private fees and your family income. The idea is that since the subsidized 7$/day daycare spaces are hard to come by, the government will now subsidize the cost of the private ones. Well, my refund was awfully large — larger than my fees, in fact — so I did some math and it turns out that the information the government is using is based on the cost of a full-time place, not part-time, and they’re overpaying me. So unless I wanted to get dinged at tax-time and have to pay half of this money back, I needed to do something. Well, I talked to HRH, and we decided to ask if we could send Owlet full-time, because we knew there was room, and with this monthly refund it works out to $7 a day exactly, which I can totally afford! The daycare director e-mailed me inviting me to switch Owlet to full-time just as I was sitting down to write to her, and so it’s all set: Owlet is now full-time in daycare, and everyone is thrilled, especially her. (Well, no. The lady at the deli counter in the supermarket today was disappointed that Owlet wasn’t with me. Owlet is her favourite customer, she tells me.)

I dyed Mum’s luxury yarn last week, and it looks AWESOME. It’s a stunning rust/terra cotta colour that just glows in the sunlight. I’ve never dyed so much yarn — remember, we’re talking 1700 yards, and about 13 oz of fibre! — or used so much dye at one time. It took 10 g of dye powder, when the most I’d used at one go before was 1 or 2 g, and I mixed the colour myself from two others. I hope she likes it. I have some touch-ups to do where the dye didn’t quite penetrate past figure-eight ties, and then I shall post pictures.

And a friend who is moving back to the UK has given me a pile of games, electronic equipment, books, and toys. I’m feeling particularly spoiled by life in general these days, and so very, very grateful for all our good fortune. I know we’ve been putting in our time this past year, and everything comes to those who work and wait, but the harvest — if that is the correct word, seeing as how that’s the time of year? — is so very appreciated.

Spinning and the Tour de Fleece 2013

So there’s this spinning thing that runs concurrently with that big bike race in France. (They race on bicycles for about three weeks. There are mountains. I like my version better.) Basically, you spin every day the contenders cycle, and rest the days they rest. It is traditional to have some sort of personal challenge to echo the challenge days in the Tour de France.

This year, I chose two challenges: spinning silk hankies (basically an empty silk moth cocoon that’s been soaked and stretched out; the actual name is mawata), and spinning some big chunky yarn. Like so many other spinners, I lost the ability to do the latter once I’d gained the ability to spin very finely. Those plus trying to spin as often as I could would be more than enough, I figured. But to start with I rummaged through my fibre stash and pulled out what my fingers decided felt nicest that day, a 50-gram twist of green Fleece Artist Merino sliver. (Maybe I should have called that a challenge, too. I am terrible at deciding what to spin next, and this was akin to closing my eyes and choosing randomly.)

Well, I spun every single day during the three-week race. And I blew through my two challenges early on (and plied them together to boot), with the added bonuses of plying 1200 yards of luxury singles I’d spun earlier in the year for Mum’s yarn, spinning 50 g of Fleece Artist Merino, and getting halfway through 6 oz of batts I’d had in my stash for about three years. I spun and plied an awful lot of yarn.

Here’s my output:

Clockwise from top:

– Fleece Artist Merino sliver in Rainforest, spun worsted and chain-plied (239 yards)
– Spiral yarn made with my two challenges, a thread spun from silk hankies dyed by myself (also on the storage bobbin at the centre, about 7 g) and a Coopworth single (64 yards)
– Bobbin of 3 oz woollen-spun worsted weight single, from Spin Knit & Life batts (Falkland, mohair, domestic wool in blended blues and browns)
– In the bottom of the basket: the 1200 yards of plied luxury yarn, one ply of 50/50 silk/cashmere, one ply of 50/50 silk/Merino (8.5 oz, 1200 yards)

And in addition to this, I saw some fabulous yarns being made, interacted with awesome people, and made lots of notes on new indie dyers to check out and techniques to try. It was a wonderful, wonderful experience.

I spun the second half of the batts the day after the Tour finished. Here’s all 455 yards of worsted weight singles, ready to be knit into a shawl:

I need to crow a bit here. I was invited to enter my Fleece Artist skein into a draw for people who’d spun fibre from that dyer, and I won! So this pretty little green skein netted me a copy of Clara Parke’s The Knitter’s Book of Yarn:

(I really wish I had more of the fibre so I could spin enough for a pair of socks. Now that I know the colourway, I can order more sometime and do just that.)

In the past week I spun an ounce of honey-coloured silk to ply with the bobbin of green Merino singles that has been waiting patiently since January (Ashland Bay ‘Sage’, to be precise). That yarn is looking very pretty indeed so far:

And last on my list of spinning stuff to journal about, it turns out that my sample skeins lied as badly as gauge swatches do in knitting. I am about 500 yards short on Mum’s yarn. Fortunately I have found an online retailer who has both the silk/Merino and the silk/cashmere in stock and will sell me two ounces of each so I can spin up the rest. As cranky as I am about being wrong, it will be lovely to spin more of these fibre blends; it was dreamy to do, and plying was a real treat as well.

Summer Vacation Begins

Portfolios have been brought home, report cards received (all very good, thank you), the backpack has been emptied, and we are on summer hols here in the dollhouse. We’re bumping against one another a bit while we find our summer rhythm.

In a nutshell:

It is hot. And humid. And stormy.

HRH demolished the old, rotting fence on the north-west side of the property and built a new one — in three days. This is it, only halfway done:

Owlet has a cold, a nose-streaming, whiny, sneezy cold. She must have caught it at the daycare get-to-know-you picnic party. Ah, the joys of challenging the immune system.

I have a concert in four days. That would be July 1, if you missed it. We’re playing Dvorak Slavic Dances, and Strauss, and Warlock’s Capriol suite, among others. Nice stompy and swingy stuff.

I finished spinning the undyed BFL/silk single and plied it with the waiting single I spun from the lavender/green/chestnut braid of My Own Fibre Club BFL/silk I dyed in April. And I completely misjudged the weight. (Not the mass, the diameter of the yarn.) So now I have 1100 yards of light silk laceweight, which does not work for what I was spinning it for at all. (Which was a lace shawlette calling for 475 yards of sock weight yarn. Yeah, I really blew it. I should have chain-plied the dyed single and skipped the other ply entirely.)

For my June edition of My Own Fibre Club, I dyed some silk hankies to spin in the upcoming Tour de Fleece. I did a two-part process, dyeing them with yellow, purple, blue, and green in the first step, then overdyeing them with blue in the second, and ended up with some truly lovely Peacock hankies.

Last weekend Sparky had his birthday party #3, the Friends From School edition, and it went very well indeed. HRH scratch-built a Minecraft cake landscape from cubes of fondant that he painted. It was a big hit.

Books… I read Elizabeth Bear’s The Shattered Pillars and it was very good, managing to not fall victim to middle-book-of-a-trilogy syndrome. I read Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which was so very, very perfect and bright and sharp. I am rereading Possession, because I have to do that every five years or so.

No work coming in, which is both worrisome and welcome. My fibro meds aren’t settling the way I was hoping they would; maybe it will take another couple of weeks to adjust.

The kitten is settling in very, very well. She loves playing with the children, purrs loudly when she snuggles into your lap, and has quite the personality. Gryff approves.

That’s what’s happening. Back into the fray.

Recent Excitement

1. We have a new kitten. She’s three months old, and it only took our big orange cat Gryffindor two days of suspicion before he started romping with her. His hisses were half-hearted, though. I think they were mostly for show.

Gryff has been clingy and needy since Cricket left us. He’s always been one of a multiple-cat household, and very social; he was miserable without another cat around. The original plan was to get another cat at the end of the summer, when Owlet turned two. Well, that plan was moved up for Gryff’s sake. Last Sunday afternoon we visited the city shelter, and came home with a wee brown and grey tabby. Meet Minerva (McGonagall, of course):

She’s zippy and so energetic that she may tire out both the kids and Gryff, now that he acknowledges that she exists in his own reality. The first evening, she raced laps in our bedroom, under the bed, up one side, running across under my knees, throwing herself off the other side, then repeating the whole thing. She’s three months old, is slim and tiny, and has wee kitten claws and wee kitten teeth. We put her carrier in a quiet part of the living room when we got her home, and I found Owlet pushing the straw of her water bottle and goldfish crackers in through the wire door to share with the kitten on two different occasions while we made supper.

We all had a really good feeling about this. We wouldn’t have brought her home otherwise, as disappointed as everyone would have been to come home kitten-less. We’re good at judging personalities and energy and estimating how they’ll fit into the energy of the family and house. Minerva was grounded, forthright and self-assured without being aggressive, and wasn’t afraid of the children. She fit in right away.

2. Sparky turned eight last Tuesday, and we celebrated his birthday this weekend en famille. My parents came in from out of town and HRH’s parents came over, too. The birthday boy requested cheeseburgers and ice cream cake for his birthday feast, which also doubled as our Father’s Day celebration, so that’s what we had for lunch on Sunday. He specified ice cream cake with an Oreo crust, a bottom layer of chocolate ice cream, and a top layer of peanut butter ice cream, so I made that Sunday morning. We had it with whipped cream and homemade hot fudge sauce, and it was really good. My mother, who does not eat desserts, had a slice and enjoyed it immensely, which was all I needed to know it was really good. (I knew everyone else would like it, and I’m glad they did. It’s just that Mum doesn’t eat desserts, so wow.)

3. Sunday afternoon Sparky and I had our end-of-year cello recital. Sparky played “Song of the Wind” extremely well, clearly, in tune, and in tempo. I had the pleasure of accompanying him again. I did a “Chanson Triste” that people thought was excellent, but I knew had been better in rehearsal. And then we played lots of good movie music as an ensemble, and we totally killed our teacher’s original four-cello-part arrangement of “Skyfall,” which we segued into after playing the James Bond theme. (I don’t know about the audience, but most of the students up on stage had goosebumps!) My teacher now has twenty students, so it made for a long afternoon, but it was good. It was great to have Marc M and Marc L in the audience, and both HRH’s parents and my parents this time; my parents haven’t heard me play for years.

My teacher is raising her lesson fees for the first time in ages next year, so it looks like I’ll have to stick to my biweekly schedule instead of returning to a weekly lesson. (Assuming I ever work again. It’s been six weeks since the publisher sent me a project. Feast or famine, that’s what this is, and I know it. Still, work would be nice, what with Owlet’s private daycare costs about to begin in August. Especially since the whole point in putting her into daycare was so that I could get work done without making myself sicker.)

4. The Tour de Fleece is coming up! This is a for-fun spinning event that runs concurrent with the Tour de France. I was so excited that I cleared my wheels two weeks ago, which was kind of a dumb move. So I’m doing my vanilla spinning now to get it out of the way and fill my time before the TdF begins at the end of June. I’ve got an undyed BFL and BFL/silk blend going on my Symphony to ply with a bobbin of dyed BFL/silk I’ve already spun, and I’m doing some longdraw singles from heathered plum roving on my Baynes Colonial to get used to woollen spinning on it.

5. It’s the last week of school for Sparky. (We got next year’s supply and fee lists today, and I’m having trouble parsing the fact that he’ll be in grade three in September.) He has a final birthday party coming up next Sunday for five friends. Then after that it’s the Canada Day concert, two weeks off for everyone, and then day camp begins for Sparky. I’ve made it through the past two weeks; I just need to make it through the next couple.