Category Archives: Photographs

Weekend Roundup

So very tired. This cold is kicking me, and dealing with the boy’s cold and being home 24/7 is draining me even more. Plus it was a packed weekend (of course).

Before the weekend roundup begins, it is important to note that on Thursday night, I rejoined the Thursday night gaming group for the first time in, oh, possibly almost a decade, because HRH rearranged the basement office to make room for a table and chairs and the gang came over here so that both HRH and I could be in the game at the same time. I’d originally dropped gaming because I was burnt out, and then there was the boy and someone needed to be home with him, so even though the spirit was willing, getting a babysitter every Thursday night was not remotely possible; besides which, the fibro over the past handful of years (pre- and post-diagnosis) makes evenings out doubtful. But the compromise of being in one Thursday night game a month(ish) and in my own home is very doable. MLG has launched a new Star Trek game which promises to be very exciting, and it was very flattering to have so many people thrilled that I was back. I’ve missed the gang, and it’s great that they’re willing to move that one game in the four-game rotation to a place where I can participate.

I got an e-mail Friday afternoon from the freelance coordinator, who congratulated me on my patience and courage in handling the horrific project I’d handed in Thursday night. And my new assignment landed, which is a lovely little 23K word general fiction manuscript to evaluate, which I suspect was cherry-picked for me after the nightmare, bless them. HRH came home at lunch on Friday, and Friday afternoon we went to HRH’s parents’ house to belatedly celebrate his mom’s birthday. It was much more relaxing than I expected it to be, and I got another inch knitted on my lace scarf. I had a good cello lesson on Friday night, too, which helped. I was upfront about my lack of energy and focus, so after we worked a bit of Mooney we sight-read the Mozart duet that M and I are playing for the recital this December. It’s just lovely, and amusingly/conveniently enough it hits all the things I need to work on: smooth bow changes, listening, timing, and expression. I didn’t hate everything I played, which I tend to do when I’m tired and can’t remember new instructions from one moment to the next. The pretty melody helps a lot with that. I love to play it. I’m so fortunate that my teacher understands that I have a condition with fatigue and focus issues, and is willing to work with me through them.

Saturday morning we did groceries and I baked. I made a double loaf of herb bread with half white and half whole wheat flour and an apple cake to take to the harvest ritual at Rowan Tree Farm that afternoon. HRH headed off belatedly to deliver things and pick Amanda up and didn’t get back till half an hour after I’d wanted to leave. As RTF is an hour and a half away that means we got there an hour later than the suggested target time. We had a lovely harvest ritual in which we counted our blessings, and then t! and Jan feasted us with local venison and boar sausages, lamb sausage, locally sourced beef, and the side dishes the guests had brought. We had to flee around seven-thirty because the boy had to get home and HRH had a bachelor party to attend back home. I felt rushed, which on top of the cold and increasing fatigue due to said cold and small boy being home sick made me disinclined to be social.

Sunday morning was Pagan playgroup, which HRH attended with us because I was too fatigued to drive safely. The coordinator was delighted to see him, especially since half the kids were missing. It was a really nice low-key day. On the way home we stopped at a pharmacy so I could finally pick up cold medication for myself. After a chat with my mum and a light lunch I napped while the boy did, and then Ceri came over for a wonderfully quiet afternoon of knitting… which neither of us did. I spun another threeish ounces of Corrie, and she crocheted. And the boy learned how to use the ball winder, an event he has been looking forward to for ages. (How many four year old boys do you know who can correctly identify a ball winder in a catalogue?)

He was very excited about making ‘yarn cakes’, and stacked three of varying sizes into a wedding cake-like configuration. Ceri got to use the skein winder in conjunction with the ball winder too, which was very exciting once we figured out the angle necessary so the thing would actually turn to wind off the skein while she wound it into a centre-pull ball. And we discovered that if I mount the skein winder on the wheel post backwards, I can keep spinning while it’s being used. Efficiency!

HRH handled dinner and let me have a bath, for which I was extremely grateful because the fatigue was getting worse. After dinner we put the boy to bed, Blade came down to be the Designated Responsible Adult On Site, and we headed out to our monthly steampunkian horror game chez Tal. Everyone was tired, so it was a very brief focused game in which yet more puzzle pieces dropped into place and important info was added to the clues we already had.

This morning the boy is home yet again, because his nose is still unpredictable and every few hours there’s a nasty coughing jag. As bronchitis popped up at the school twice in the past couple of weeks, I’m taking him to the doctor today (if there’s an appointment free; can’t call till nine, and the line will be swamped with everyone calling in after the weekend, grr) to make sure all’s well with him. If I can’t get an appointment, I’ll try sending him in tomorrow.

Speaking of which, I’m off to brave the phone lines. Wish us luck.

ETA: Forty minutes to get through… and the doctor’s not in this week. The nurse asked if he had a fever (no), if there was anything alarming (no), was I giving him anything for it (yes, an expectorant syrup), said that a lot of the viruses (virii?) going round left lingering dry coughs that weren’t indicators of anything serious, and to take him to a clinic if it hasn’t cleared up by the end of the week. Fine; Plan B it is! Keep him home today, send him in tomorrow.

Speed Bump

The boy woke up with a horrific asthma attack around eleven on Tuesday night. He hasn’t had one in two years. This was eerily reminiscent on that previous attack, too: suddenly waking up in a panic almost incapable of breathing. The good thing is that he’s two years older and understands that the mask and inhaler help him to some degree almost immediately. So that plus a glass of water and some cuddling got him calmed to a point where he eventually fell asleep again, although he woke up again four hours later for a repeat of all treatment. I had trouble getting back to sleep every time, so I think I clocked a total of three or four hours. When we got up at six it was obvious that he wasn’t going anywhere, so I called preschool and let them know he was staying home. Both his teacher and I were mystified as to the origins of the attack, as there had been no signs of a cold or anything triggery the day before. Mid-morning he developed a very low-grade fever (just two- or three-tenths of a degree above average), which led me to suspect that he was indeed fighting some kind of cold or flu.

We went out to pick up refills on his inhalers and an expectorant syrup, and ran other errands as well. As the day went on it became increasingly hard for me to breathe as well. The weather had done a drastic switcheroo and went super-humid, which may have been a major factor in the asthma. As the day went on, however, it became increasingly evident that there was a major impressively icky full-blown chest cold developing. This asthma attack, like the one two years ago, had been an early warning response to the imminent pulmonary-focused illness.

With the lack of sleep, I tried to nap when the boy went down for his rest, but I was wide awake, which did not bode well for the rest of the day. I did get some spinning done, though, and when the boy woke up he climbed into the chair next to me (along with five cars and Blackie), followed closely by Gryffindor. Let me tell you, the chair was pretty crowded, and drafting was a challenge. But the boy took pictures!

I finished spinning the Blue Faced Leicester fibre I had left over from the spindle workshop I took in May, and I knew there wasn’t going to be enough yardage for the project Ceri needs it for. So I called Ariadne Knits, and they had both half-pound bags of both Corriedale and Merino top in stock. The boy and I popped down to pick up a pound of the Corriedale (much less expensive than I was expecting!) so I’ll have enough for all the yardage required (have to start over again, as I discovered that BFL is “hard to felt”, which is ungood for the particular project Ceri has in mind) plus extra for people to try it out (crafting weekend in Alexandria coming up, hurrah) and dyeing experiments. Using the commercially prepared BFL top is a blissful experience. It’s like night and day when I compare it to spinning the unknown bits of wool I carded and dizzed into sliver myself. This is more even, smoother, and easier to draft. It shouldn’t be a surprise, of course; you get what you pay for. And as Ceri pointed out to me, this is why people stress that you should work with the best stuff you can afford, whatever your craft. The less expensive stuff is less expensive, but you never know when the fibre is working against you, and when it’s your technique that’s causing the problem. One should also really enjoy what one’s doing, and using the best material you can afford contributes greatly to that.

In this case, I am so glad that it was the quality of the fibre that was the problem. My beautiful BFL singles, let me show you them:

I can’t wait to ply them. Except if do that, I use up my last free bobbin, and I can’t spin my Corrie. No, wait, that’s stupid; if I ply them, I end up with two free bobbins at the end. Never mind. Or one free, anyway, because there’s more on one bobbin than the other, so there will be leftover single. And my last attempt at Navajo plying was amusingly disastrous, so perhaps we won’t to that again. Or, well, why not; I have to learn, and this is as good as anything else to practice on. Or I can just skein the leftover single and wind it into a centre-pull ball on Sunday when Ceri comes over to play. (This example of stream of consciousness thought is brought to you by slowly shifting into work mode from early-morning mode.)

Needless to say, I got no freelance work done yesterday; then again, I didn’t expect to. Although I really wanted the project done and gone so I didn’t have to think about it any more. Ah, well; we all encounter speed bumps. The boy’s home again today, as he will be for the rest of the week. The glamour of being home sick has worn off, and now he is cranky, irritable, and whiny. And I have to work today regardless, as today’s my deadline. HRH is going to try to come home early, around the end of the boy’s nap, so I’ll have at least naptime and a couple of extra hours to polish the report.

I didn’t make it to orchestra last night, as the lack of sleep, my own developing cold (yes, another one; the boy’s ambushed me while my immune system was still down form the last light cold), and the running around all day had taken its toll. I was achy, dizzy, and couldn’t hold things securely with my hands, so in the interests of not totally running myself down and making myself and everyone around me at orchestra miserable I called and let them know I wasn’t going to make it. And wow, did I ever sleep well.

So today the boy is enjoying cartoons in his pyjamas for a good long time, and I am opening the freelance document, and work shall be done. He knows to leave me alone as much as possible, and so far so good.

The Long-Awaited Spinning Wheel Arrives; Or, Yet Another Photo Essay

Just shy of eight weeks after I ordered it, my Louet S-15 wheel is finally here. I think I used up all my excitement waiting and fretting about it, because I have been remarkably sanguine about the whole affair since MA e-mailed me to confirm that it had arrived on Tuesday. I’ve somewhat disappointed in myself, actually; I wanted that adrenaline rush making the pickup and assembly and first go on it just a bit more exciting.

There’s a humorous saying that Louet is like the Ikea of spinning wheels. When we picked up the box at Ariadne yesterday (boxes, really, because my free skeinwinder was separate) we saw that the saying was so far accurate: it was shipped in a big flat box, complete with convenient carry-handle. Not what one envisions when one thinks “spinning wheel” at all. I’d been warned, so I knew what to expect.

Once home, we ate (this was very, very hard for the boy, despite having picked up chicken and fries from his favourite restaurant, St. Hubert, on the way home from Ariadne, because he was so incredibly excited about the wheel) and then adjourned to the living room to unpack the boxes.

The box yielded five pieces: the flyer, the-mother-of-all that holds the flyer and bobbin, the upright back post with the wheel on it, and the base/treadle unit, and the bobbins and the kate (the wire bobbin-holder on the base). If this photo is so far exploding your mental image of a spinning wheel, it gets even better. (Or worse, I suppose, depending on how attached you are to the image of a stereotypical Sleeping Beauty-style wheel, more correctly termed a Saxony wheel.)

We put it together to make sure everything was there and that it worked before staining it. We screwed two nuts onto bolts, and snapped the footman connector onto the flywheel. And that was literally that. And like Ikea, Louet thoughtfully includes the necessary wrenches with their material, so we didn’t even need to dig one out. Louet goes beyond Ikea, however, in that they even include a half-pound of fibre in the box (in my case a half-pound of black Coopworth) so you can set up and go right out of the box without any fuss. It’s like the Mac of spinning wheels or something. Anyway, so after attaching a leader onto a bobbin (which took longer than assembling the wheel, I confess, argh) we could spin.

And we did.

I spun a tiny handful of test fibre for a moment or two (and got a very respectable thin though slightly uneven yarn, yay me), but the boy was bursting to try. I got a ball of acrylic from the closet and tied it on for him so he could practice treadling (he’s not really there yet, even with me helping) and maintaining the tension on the fibre in his hands. He “spun” up a bunch, then I put the skeinwinder on the wheel (not shown here), wound it off for him, then showed him how to twist it into a skein, with which he was absolutely delighted because it was “his yarn that he had spun”. As you can see, Gryffindor is fascinated with the flywheel. There’s a black knob on the back of the disc that caps the bit you snap the footman on to, and he was watching it go round and round.

The boy cried when it was time to go to bed. I promised him he could spin again tonight.

Once he was in bed I took the wheel apart and began staining it. (For reference purposes, I used Varathane Gel Stain in Early American, no. 466, and I adore the colour; it’s almost exactly what I wanted. I would have preferred something a tad lighter, but the next lighter colours were much too gold or red for my taste, and besides, this will lighten slightly over time with exposure to sunlight.) The wood didn’t even need a sanding; all I had to do was wipe it down with a bit of flannel. It did soak up stain, but not to such an extent that the colour went irreversibly dark immediately. After I finished staining each piece I wiped off the excess and evened it out. It only took about an hour, and then I left it to dry overnight.

The stain is only supposed to take six to eight hours to dry, but I happened to stain it on the only night where we got rain in September. It was still a wee bit tacky when we got up, but I gave it another two hours then rubbed it down with another piece of flannel (and near knackered myself doing it, stupid fibro). Then I put it back together.


Astute persons will see that the drive band is not on in the above pictures. What can I say; I was so excited about putting it together to take pictures for you that I forgot it. It’s on now. I haven’t decided if I’m going to stain the bobbins yet or not. It would be finicky. The wheel itself needs a touch-up in one or two tiny places.

It does not yet have a name, although it is a girl, and I am leaning toward Verity. I shall have to see what she feels like over the next week or so before she is properly named.

It’s a very modern-looking wheel, but I’m very all right with that. I wanted something with a small footprint, which meant an upright instead of a Saxony, and I wanted something I was comfortable with that was low-maintenance, didn’t require much adjustment, and could be easily serviced in case of problems. My LYS is a Louet dealer, and I worked with their Louet and was very happy with it. It’s remarkably light and not awkward at all to carry, which means that I can move it from the living room and back to my office when I want to, or even to the back deck in the summer. It will travel very well in the boot of the car on its back on a blanket. (Although I hear that many Louet spinners buckled their wheels into a seat in the car, which would also work.) I couldn’t do that with a Saxony. I’m also not afraid to knock this one about a bit; if I had a nicer traditional-looking wheel I’d be worried about it all the time. Louets are workhorses and go on forever, judging from the enthusiastic following they have in the spinning community. When I have room, and when I am better at this, and when there is extra money, perhaps I shall look into getting a Saxony as well. That’s far in the future, however. I have my wheel; I am content.

—

Flyers, mother-of-all, footman? I have no idea what you’re talking about! Here’s a diagram of a generic Louet upright wheel with all the parts named for you, although the model pictured is a few steps above my basic model.

What are the specs of your wheel? Here’s a basic outline of the Louet wheels, as they’re mostly the same with only minor differences. There’s a page for the S-15 but it doesn’t tell you anything more.

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ETA: I managed twenty yards of two-ply today, which is now hanging to dry. It is lumpy and uneven, will probably knit terribly, and I love it.

My Dyeing Experiment No. 2: Another Photo Essay

By Me.

(Or, I Have No Self-Restraint, Even Though I Am Being Virtuous By Doing Laundry, Baking Rolls, and Proofing The Freelance Thing At The Same Time.)

Today’s experiments: two concurrent dye jobs! Again, we have our setup:

From left to right: Brown, teal blue for the 1/4 oz first sample of fibre; burgundy and violet for the second. I had my doubts about that burgundy; it looked awfully brown. But this is why we swatch. Er, experiment. (Because we all know that swatches are actually lying little liars.)

The tea in the background was not used in the dyeing process.

I forgot to take Before pictures of the fibre in the freshly poured dye, but just imagine the colours you see in the glasses poured onto a faintly off-white fibre. Here’s the brown/teal, after its first trip to the microwave.

Here’s the burgundy/violet, after the first heating. Wow! Check out how drastically different the colour is after only two minutes in the microwave!

Here they are after their requisite heating times, with the dye fully developed.

And here they are, rinsed and dried.

Now, even I can see that the burgundy is deep pink, and the violet is, well, kind of a bright violet. I’m sure a little girl somewhere would love it. The way to tone things down is to mix, or overdye. But I’m pleased with the brown/teal, because it comes closest to what my brain was expecting. I’m going to need to work on deepening that brown, though.

And on that note, I am going to switch laundry then finish proofing the freelance thing.

My First Dyeing Experiment: A Photo Essay

By Me.

From left to right in the photo above we have a microwave-safe dish, with a coil of sliver (precise content unknown, beyond “it’s wool from Canadian sheep”) in it, and my four test dyes: brown, royal blue, yellow, and copper. The fibre weighed barely 1/4 oz. I used maybe a tablespoon to two tablespoons of the dye solution for each colour, perhaps more of the blue and less of the copper.

The fibre, with the dyes poured over it, just before it’s put in the microwave for its series of two-minute heatings. You can see how the blue and yellow are blending and being pulled around the dish by capillary action. Clockwise from upper left: blue, yellow, copper, brown.

The fibre, now dyed, after the dye has set and the water has been poured off. (Yeah, I apologize for not using a consistent background colour.)

The teeny-tiny braid of dried fibre, posing with the big ball o’fibre that had its origins in a 3 oz bag stuffed full of mill ends and scrap that I picked through, combed/carded, then dizzed off with a button and rolled the resulting sliver into a ball.

In my opinion, the dyed fibre looks rather like a mangled parakeet. But this particular little dead budgie is my dead budgie, dyed all by myself. Now I know how things react with one another, and how the process works. Blue is very aggressive, as is yellow. (That’s why so much of this is blue, yellow, and green.) The brown needs a lot more dye to water ratio for a stronger colour. The copper is almost unnoticeable.

I call this experiment a success in the gaining experience department. Next experiment: to see what happens when it’s spun.

(I have done other stuff today, namely finish a never-ending editorial evaluation. I decided to treat myself to this test while making dinner. No dinners were dyed in the course of this experiment.)

ETA: OOOH! I could conduct Another Experiment and try overdyeing the fibre with more brown to tone it down/enrich the brown tones! Must plot.

Fifty-One Months Old!

Oh, there was great emotional trauma this past month. The boy was playing out back with HRH and wailed when he discovered that he’s too big to make the little ride-on tractor he got just before he turned two move through the grass by pushing with his feet. He just can’t get the leverage any more, because his legs are so long that his knees are up around his ears. He was very distraught. The thing comes up to below his knee when he stands next to it; he can pick it up and tuck it under one arm. HRH said, “See, that’s new. You could never do that before.” And he tried to tell the boy that it was super awesome cool that he could carry a tractor, but the boy as unconvinced. He’s too big for the sandbox now, too; we haven’t told him that it’s being dismantled this fall. More resisting the growing up…

One of the three new fish died, of no discernible cause. This is the first time that he’s really been aware enough or present when we discovered it, and he had a minor breakdown, despite the fact that he ignores them most of the time. The only way he could work through it was to imagine that a shark was going to eat the flushed fish corpse. How this made it okay, I will never know. I’d have thought it would be more traumatic.

He made up his own Transformer and described it so HRH could draw it, then he sat down with his pencil crayons and coloured it. Unfortunately this has led to arguments and tears when he gets dressed because he has a shirt and a pair of pants in those colours, so he wants to wear them every day so he can pretend to be that Transformer. One day I told him he’d just have to use his imagination, and he stomped his feet and said, “But I can’t use my imagination!” Which amused me, of course, as that’s exactly what he’s doing when he wears those clothes.

He’s developed a very sweetgoodnight kiss routine. First he kisses me and hugs me, then I kiss and hug him, and then we both kiss and hug one another. There are specific words that go along with it: he says, “First me [kiss and hug]; now you [kiss and hug],” and then we both say, “And now, both of us, together.”

Fave songs these days include “Hickory Dickory Dock,” “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and “E Eats Everything.” We are anxiously awaiting the Canadian street release of Here Comes Science by TMBG. We have a couple of the new videos from it thanks to podcasts and YouTube, so everyone has “Electric Car,” “Paleontologist,” and “Davy Crockett (In Space)” stuck in their brains.

He’s so tall that all his pyjamas are too short in legs and arms. I’ve gone through a lot of his clothes, and we’re going to need new boots again (probably a size ten) and likely new socks as well. Good grief.

There are tougher things going on that he’s struggling to wrap his mind around, too. There are new kids at school, one who is a classic high maintenance child and who tells him on a regular basis that (a) he can’t play with her or be her friend, (b) she is his friend and therefore he can’t play with another already established older friend, or (c) if he plays with someone else he doesn’t like her. He is utterly confused, and often hurt by these statements. “But why would she say something like that, Mama?” he asks, usually at night after our story when we’re snuggling in bed. Trying to explain insecurity and fear of being rejected so one attempts to manipulate and arrange everyone’s relationships to a four year old is challenging, to say the least.

“What’s that?” he said when we were in the yarn store. “A ball winder,” I told him. He gazed at it hungrily, standing as close to it as he could, and I explained how it worked. “Can we get one?” he said. Recently he asked if he could help me knit and was upset when I asked him not to, so I got out the size 11 needles and a ball of rainbow yarn, and cast ten stitches on for him to knit. At the moment we’re at the ‘Mama holds her hands over his hands’ stage, but he is very enthusiastic about wrapping the yarn over the RH needle to make the new stitch. He has decided that he is knitting a scarf for his teacher (first it was a hat “because hers is getting very old”, but I suggested the easier scarf instead and he took the suggestion readily).

We ‘goed’ and ‘wented’ places, and it feels like I’m constantly correcting him on that one point of grammar alone. He used to say ‘went’ correctly, so I suspect either the new kids at school are misusing them, or he’s consciously trying to conjugate and getting it wrong because English follows so many different rules.

There is great excitement at breakfast now. On weekends we set up a bowl of cereal, a small finger bowl of raisins, and a spoon at the table, and turn a big plastic mixing bowl over it all so the cats don’t have a festival with it at night. We put a glass of juice in the fridge, and a half-glass of milk. When he gets up in the morning he comes and crawls into bed for a cuddle, then whispers that he’s going to go make his breakfast, patters into the kitchen to take the milk and juice out of the fridge, uncover the cereal, pour the milk and raisins into the cereal bowl, and have his breakfast. He adores it; he feels so grown up and important. And the bonus is, HRH and I get to sleep in a bit longer.

Fearsclave and his wife got a new kitten this past month, and she’s so tiny she needed to be fed from a bottle for a few weeks. They called her Maggy, and the boy was absolutely enchanted with the short video Fearsclave posted of the kitten being fed. I dug out a squeeze bottle and he ‘fed’ his own stuffed Maggie:

Things you can do with knitting needles other than knit: conduct!