Category Archives: Spirituality

Weekend Roundup

Everything seems to have happened on Saturday. The first half of Saturday, at that.

Saturday morning I had my first cello lesson in just under a month. Suddenly I had to decide between the Lully gavotte and the Bach gavotte for next month’s recital, which felt slightly unfair because we’d set the deadline at the last lesson and I haven’t had a chance to work on it with my teacher since then. I really do want to play the Bach, though, so my teacher said we’d do it. On the way home I second-guessed myself and was sure I’d made the wrong decision, and I’m still fairly certain I’ll blow it badly. But then, I’d feel the same way about the Lully, so I can’t win either way. In the lesson we worked on the upper body being free to move from side to side with the elbow-led bow stroke, which felt very awkward and wrong, but it did create some very nice sound. I think I’m too locked up when I play, so my teacher’s trying to get me to loosen up while still being aware enough of my body to control the sound.

Things to remember: Keep fingers aimed more toward the bridge instead of parallel to it, remember to use the back of the thumb instead of only the side in thumb position, don’t shortchange the last note before a new bow or phrase, stop leading RH movement with the wrist (my teacher was also initially trained to do this and her teacher still calls her on it, so I don’t feel as hopeless about this as I could, although I still feel pretty hopeless indeed), and the speed of the shift needs to match the speed of the song.

I raced home from the lesson to pick up HRH and the boy, stopped by the grocery store to grab cold meats and cheese and bread, then went to Angrignon Park for Tristan’s naming ceremony. (Yes, two naming ceremonies in one week.) It was lovely. Very different from the previous week’s ceremony, which was more formal in the setup and dress. This one was a circle of friends around blankets, balloons in the wind, and a baby who decided to protest the delay in feeding. We did a couple of fixes on the fly (a dandelion for the flower, the candle went out so I used the cloud-covered sun as the light) and there was laughter, which always blesses a ritual. And I finally got to use part of the baby-blessing ritual I wrote for my second book, which was intended to be used for the boy, but he ended up arriving early and in the race to keep up we never got around to holding a naming ceremony for him.

When it was over we all hauled out our picnic stuff, sat on blankets or camp chairs or around the picnic table, and ate. The boy ran around with MLG (fencing lessons with sticks; I love my friends) and a younger boy whom he decided needed looking after, so he kept feeding him, much to our amusement. HRH and I got to play with a cheerful ten(?)-month-old, who proceeded to impress his mum by trying to take steps on his own (with support, of course) and feed himself, and rather capably, too, for someone who didn’t do it regularly. And his mum asked if I’d do a naming for him, as well! It was so nice to just sit and relax with friends, and watch kids play, and nibble at stuff. A couple of hours later the threatening clouds eventually started spitting actual rain so we all packed up in about five minutes and headed for home, where we put a movie on for the boy and I was ambushed by a ninja nap.

Sunday was a very quiet day. HRH ran around, though, getting the summer tires put on (to our dismay, the sound the wheels were making was not entirely the winter tires; seems the bearings may need repacking, too) and heading over to his parents’ house in the afternoon to lay the new bathroom floor. Not having the brainpower or the energy to do much, I pulled out the spinning wheel and spun up two more samples from the January Phat Fiber box (yes, I’m only a third of the way through the samples; I’m making this last). I also wove in the last few weft ends on the baby blanket I wove for the last naming ceremony, and machine washed it to block the weave. I want to run it by Ceri first to make sure I’m not going to embarrass myself by gifting it (there are a couple of errors where a warp thread didn’t rise or lower properly so there’s a skip, but while I can see every one of them like they’re circled with blinking red lights, others probably don’t). Actually, I wanted to weave instead of spin, but since there was nothing on the loom, I didn’t. I had nowhere near the mental focus or energy required to wind a warp then get it on the loom. Maybe this week. I finally got a copy of Betty Davenport’s classic Hands On Rigid Heddle Weaving, which didn’t reveal anything earth-shattering to me, but did clearly outline the process of warping from back to front, which I will try next time instead of direct warping.

Hey, my new reeds ought to be here at the end of the week.

Ceri lent me her point-and-shoot camera (I am discovering that a manual setting on a point-and-shoot is a rare thing, which makes me sad because I’ll have to pay more for it), so I can show the blanket off and the stuff I’ve spun over the past couple of weeks… once I have the energy to set it all up and photograph it. And in other random fibre arts news, I thought the size 4 Harmony tips for my circular needles from KnitPicks were faulty; one kept falling right off the cable, the screw not catching at all. I thought I’d have to contact them this week so I could keep working on my sleeveless sweater without losing stitches when the cable fell off the needle, which is what happened on Friday night. But I remembered that I had a second set of size 4 tips, which came in the full set I bought after testing a separate pair of tips and cables, so I tried one of them instead. It turns out that it’s the cable that’s faulty, not the tip. I tried another 24″ cable, et voila! The previously suspicious tips are just fine. I could call them for a replacement cable, but I have three other 24″ cables (one other from the original pair I bought, plus anotherpair from the full set) and I doubt I’ll ever have them all in use at the same time.

Finally, for dinner last night I used Karine’s garlic-teriyaki pork slow cooker recipe, and it was fabulous. Slow cooker recipes are usually simple, but this one was gleefully easy. Definitely a keeper. Next time I’m going to caramelize onions and fry mushrooms to toss on top of it before the sauce is poured over top at the table.

Weekend Roundup

This was a glorious weekend. The weather was spectacular: it was brilliantly sunny and the temperature hovered between sixteen and twenty degrees.

Friday night I attended the rehearsal for the handfasting I was priestessing on Saturday. I didn’t know these women before I was referred to them, but I’ve really enjoyed working with them. They’re funny, loving, and the just right kind of people, you know? Their friends are equally fun, and we spent a lot of the two walk-throughs giggling. It relaxed everybody.

Saturday morning I had some errands to run, and I took the boy with me. “Mama,” he whispered as I buckled him into the car. “You know what we could do? We could go to Tim Horton’s.” He was so funny that I had to laugh, and decided that sure, we could have a treat. Well, the treat turned into a crisis, because as I pulled up to the drive-through speaker I said, “What doughnut do you want, the chocolate-covered one?” and he said yes. So I ordered him a chocolate-glazed doughnut and myself a maple-glazed one. I handed him his bag as we pulled around front and he pulled the doughnut out, then his face crumpled up. “Mama,” he said, “you made a mistake, you got the wrong doughnut!” And then I remembered that he and HRH had been sharing the occasional Boston Cream doughnut, and that I had, indeed, misunderstood and erred in my order. I apologised, we parked the car, and went inside to order the right kind for him. They were out of chocolate-glazed Boston Creams, but they did have maple-glazed; the boy decided that he was game to try one, and loved it. So a tragedy was turned into an exciting new discovery. (And I got an extra doughnut out of it.)

We stopped by Ceri and Scott’s house for fifteen minutes so we could trade books and I could drop off things to be taken to the monthly Random Colour craft session that I was going to miss. Then we went to Pointe-Claire Village to select chocolates for birthday and handfasting gifts, and a lovely little pair of heart-shaped Peruvian hammered silver earrings for my goddaughter’s eight birthday. Then it was back home for lunch and a rest for the boy, and I got ready for the ceremonies I was priestessing.

The handfasting was absolutely beautiful. The couple has been legally married for seven years but chose to have a spiritual service to celebrate their seventh anniversary, and to have their infant daughter named on the same day. No matter how many times you walk through something, when the actual day comes and it’s the real thing, everything is special and meaningful and so much more moving. I was complimented by guests several times for beautiful services, and every time I pointed out that the couple had written them and they should get the credit. The couple finally pointed out to me in return that anyone could have read it in a monotone: I may have had good material with which to work, but I made it special for them. There is a certain return in blessings; when you bless someone else in a ritual or rituals like this, you’re blessed in turn by their joy and love for one another. This was the first time I’ve ever performed such a deeply meaningful ritual for someone I didn’t already know, and I’m deeply thankful that it was such a joyful experience.

When I got home there was an e-mail waiting for me from Miranda, asking if we still had our baby swing. We checked, and we did, so we bundled everyone into the car and brought it over to her. We finally got to meet baby Tristan, who is just one month old. We had to cancel our earlier visit two weeks ago, so we were very happy to have an excuse to stop by and see him. A couple of days earlier Miranda had asked me if I would perform his naming ceremony, which I agreed to do immediately, and I was glad to be able to meet him before the day of the actual ritual! The excellent day continued with a brief visit with the Preston-LeBlancs, where we dropped off their birthday gifts and chatted for a quarter of an hour before finally heading home.

Sunday morning was the monthly Pagan playgroup meeting, where we talked about a potential camping trip for the families late this summer, made tissue paper flowers for Beltane, and worked on a new circle-casting song. And there were healthier snacks! The group has grown yet again.

We went home for lunch and the boy only had a brief lie-down before he got up again; it looks like we’re down to one nap per weekend. At two-thirty the boy and I packed up and headed out for the West Island Youth Symphony Orchestra‘s free concert called “1910 – A Celebration in Music,” programmed to celebrate the city of Beaconsfield’s centenary. The last time I heard the WIYSO was, erm, sixteen years ago, when I was looking for a cello teacher. Not only was this a chance for me to actually attend a concert (imagine! live orchestral music that I wasn’t playing!), it was an opportunity to share a concert-going experience with my son. And finally, I’d also have the chance to see my new conductor in action with a different group. I explained to the boy that this orchestra was made up of kids, and he immediately asked if he could join. I told him that these were older kids, but in four three years (holy cats) he would be eligible to join the junior orchestra, if he liked.

I let him choose where we sat in the auditorium (on the cello side, halfway between the wall and the aisle; we had the whole row to ourselves), and he explored the fold-down seats and asked all sorts of questions about the theatre (he thought we were going to a movie theatre, for some reason). When the lights went down for the orchestra to tune, he caught sight of the conductor just offstage, and he turned to me. “It’s Stewart!” he said with great excitement, and I had to laugh; he made it sound like he and the conductor were old buddies.

Overall, he was very good. They played the music “all in a row,” as he told HRH back home; in other words, there was no intermission, and the concert lasted just over an hour. He was a bit squirmy, climbing from his seat to my seat to the seat on my other side, or lying down across my lap with his sweater over him as a blanket, but he wasn’t disruptive or distracting, and we never needed to resort to pulling out his books or colouring books. His first favourite bit was the Maple Leaf Rag (who can resist ragtime?), and he pretended to play a trombone through it, humming into his straw bottle of apple juice and moving his free hand forward and back in front of him. The guy sitting behind us thought it was hilarious. The Joplin was blown out of the water by Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, however. It may have been partially due to the fact that in the music he could hear the story that Stewart had briefly outlined for the audience before the piece began. “Mama,” he whispered during the first movement, “do firebirds have fur?” “No,” I said, “they have beautiful, long feathers made of flames.” “Not the babies,” he said authoritatively. “They have fuzz.” “Oh,” I said, “so they get their fire-feathers when they grow up?” “Yes,” he said, quite firmly.

He crawled onto my lap at one point to snuggle, and had his head on my shoulder when the first crashing chord of the Danse Infernale began. He must have jumped six inches into the air before sitting straight up and staring at the orchestra. I had to try very hard not to giggle, and I could hear the guy behind us muffling a snicker, too. The boy sat up very straight and applauded loudly when it was over, the first piece for which he’d done so with such enthusiasm. He talked about it had been the best part of the concert and about firebirds and baby firebirds all the way out and through the parking lot, to the amusement of other patrons. It seems that my son is a budding Stravinsky fan.

He’d been so good that we picked up a bonus doughnut on the way home (chocolate-glazed Boston Cream, this time).

Throughout the weekend, HRH finished moving us out of the basement room we’d been using as an office with the upstairs neighbours. We can’t afford the extra money each month, not when our half of the rent for that room is equivalent to the cost of the gas we use monthly. So HRH has moved us and our laundry equipment back into the garage, which is even cosier than it was in its first incarnation of his office, and has the added bonus of now having room for the table we sit around to game once a month or so. We purged a lot of stuff, as well. It’s currently a bit tight, but people will be coming to remove some of the equipment we’ve been holding for them over the next couple of weeks, so we’ll be able to actually get the bikes in and out again.

Weekend Roundup, Spring Edition

On Friday night I had my cello lesson where some things fell apart, and others worked. I guess overall it was good, but there were parts that left me really down. This is the part of the-tearing-apart-current-technique process I hate. I know to expect sounding awful while my brain and muscles struggle to implement new info, but it doesn’t do much for feeling good about yourself or your work. A new étude that my teacher assigned had me trying to figure out what it sounded like, and I finally made the connection: it was in the same key and rhythmic pattern as the piece my teacher had suggested doing for the spring recital back in January, the Bach Gavotte from the third Suzuki book, a piece I love. I shared this insight with her and she was slightly taken aback, because we haven’t started it yet and usually she prefers students to present a polished piece they’ve worked on for a good long time. So there was miscommunication: I expected her to assign it when she thought it was time, and she perhaps forgot or had just been thinking aloud. She suggested doing the Lully Gavotte instead, but told me to work on both as the Lully has lots of stuff we can apply to the Bach, and if the Bach is good enough we can do that. We have three months; we’ll see what happens.

Saturday was our spring co-coven all-day retreat. I was up at six baking a double batch of cinnamon buns that I’d mixed the night before. We left at quarter to eight to drop the boy off at his local grandparents’ house, pick up the last-minute supplies we needed, get gas, then pick up our two coveners and get to the workshop site (theoretically for nine, but we didn’t make it there till nine-twenty because of traffic and losing a bit of time at every stop). The morning was great: the cinnamon rolls and tea or coffee, then our opening ritual that invoked the energy of the elements in various ways to bless the weather, our creative pursuits, and new beginnings or reawakenings, then a good talk on shield theory, and a discussion comparing and contrasting the handling of energy in Reiki and magic. Lunch always arrives surprisingly quickly, and it was fabulous: cannelloni, honey-garlic chicken, salad, and homemade bread. The main ritual was a guided meditation, after which I had to leave for a replacement rehearsal at orchestra as we’d lost two earlier in the season due to weather and March break.

The rehearsal was good work. Things are starting to come together, although I have determined that I have White Stick Syndrome. This is similar to White Coat Syndrome in which people’s blood pressure skyrockets at hospitals or doctor’s offices, except in my case when the conductor turns around and stands right in front of me to conduct our section I completely lose any ability to read my music and play things I know perfectly well. Sitting second chair has its hazards.

Two and a half hours later I went back to pick up the rest of the crew. We dropped them off and picked up the boy, then went home for dinner. In my quest to turn my son into a fellow Vaughan Williams fan, At the end of dinner I played the Wasps overture for the boy so he’d know it at the concert, and then the March Past of the Kitchen Utensils which came next on the CD (why are there no recordings of this to share? I am sad, it’s a great piece), doing a puppet show for him with my hands over the half-wall between the living room and the kitchen while telling him this was the wooden spoon marching past, this was the ladle, and, timed to coincide with the crashing chords, this was the meat tenderizer, THUMP! He giggled so hard he almost gave himself the hiccoughs and kept saying, “Do it again, Mama, do it again!” I promised him we could do it for HRH one day with the real kitchen utensils, and we went through the tin of spoons and such by the stove to figure out what we would use. I may even break out the fabric stash to make little cloaks for them, and possibly acquire googly eyes to stick on with a bit of blue-tack for extra fun.

Sunday morning I felt awful. I’d worn myself out on Saturday, so the sinus cold that I’d been fighting for the past week gained the upper hand. I took sinus medication, which pretty much knocked me out, and I spent most of the morning in a doze wherever I was sitting. While HRH vacuumed, I showed the boy the live feed of Molly the wild barn owl sitting on her eggs, the first of which was due to hatch Sunday. It’s absolutely fascinating to watch her; barn owls are incredibly elegant, and knowing there was an owlet working on chipping its way out of the egg made it hard to turn the feed off. The first one hatched while we both napped and HRH was out getting groceries, and then the feed went down, so we watched a recording of the owlet instead. (The feed is back today, thank goodness; the servers crashed because so many people were watching it.)

As it was the first weekend of spring, we celebrated by going out for ice cream. We visited the opened-last-summer Bilboquet location in Pointe-Claire village, which has seats inside (our regular spot doesn’t) and it was just as fabulous as everyone who’s enjoyed the downtown location has ever told me. The boy had straight chocolate, I had chocolate with white chocolate-vanilla slabs and nuts in it, and HRH had tire a sucre ice cream, vanilla swirled with real maple taffy from a local cabane a sucre. It was incredible. It’s a limited-time availability thing, so, um, we’ll be going back next Sunday so we can all have some before the season is over. It snowed on Sunday, too, enough to cover the grass again (although it melted overnight) and there was something peculiarly decadent about sitting on the stools at the front window, eating ice cream while watching the snow fall.

Weekend Roundup, Imbolc Edition

Yes, I missed last weekend’s roundup. I’ll do it eventually and backdate it [It’s done, here.] The most important bit was the spinning 102 class, and I have that in note form written to people who asked about it via e-mail.

This was a fun weekend, but draining. Friday I went out to lunch with MLG, where I had truly delicious braised lamb shanks and a pint of cider, and then as the weather was lovely, I walked him to class. It was a tutorial, actually, but wow did that feel odd; I’ve been out of school for a decade (my shiny new MA is no longer so very shiny or new) and the university neighbourhood has been polished and reworked, and two new metal and glass buildings have sprung up where there were once boarded-up lots.

(Many joke intros ran through my head on the way home. “So a cellist and a drummer walk into a pub…” was one of them. So was “So an EngLit MA and an MBA guy walk into a pub…”)

On the way home I stopped to deposit Emily’s second cheque (so close to the end of this project!) and pick up immediately necessary groceries, and I swung into Winners to do a quick look round because I could, and I so rarely do. While there I saw a pair of burgundy shoes on for half-price and wavered for a moment, but then told myself sternly that I shouldn’t even try them on and left.

Saturday morning we all went out on errands. While out we finally found an Anakin figure as well as an Ahsoka figure, and the boy was thrilled to finally have people to fly his starfighter. We also picked up a new Scrabble game, as ours has gone AWOL (most likely to people who love it and use it frequently), as the boy saw me playing an online Scrabble-clone game on the iTouch with Emily and various other people, and was frustrated because he couldn’t play. I promised that a real board would be easier to use, and it was. He loves it, and calls it Scramble, and we got about five rounds in before he decided he’d had enough.

Saturday afternoon Ceri called and asked if I wanted to go over and play, so I packed the spinning wheel, my Phat Fiber box to show her, and my cotton, and off I went when the boy went down for his nap. We had lots of fun, although spinning the cotton continues to elude me. I tried shredding it and spinning from a cloud and it sort of worked, but it keeps drifting apart. I’m trying to find the sweet spot between overspinning it and getting it to hold together, and it’s just not happening. I saw another video where a woman was long-draw drafting right from the unsplit roving; I think I’ll try working on that again, since the cloud doesn’t work, and the splitting roving to narrower pieces doesn’t quite work either.

I soothed my annoyed spirit by making my first foray into the Phat Fiber samples and spinning a quarter-ounce of lovely dyed Merino wool from Ambrosia and Bliss. It was my first experience with Merino, and I suddenly see why people like or hate it it so much. It’s very spongy, with lots of tiny crimp; quite unlike the smooth BFL and Corriedale I’ve been working with. It made a lovely chain-plied 20 wpi yarn:


Why, yes, 20 wpi is heavy laceweight/really light fingering weight, thank you for noticing. And for noticing that it’s chain-plied, too, which means there’s three strands in that plied yarn. You’re very kind. I draw ever closer to confidently spinning the gorgeous Lorna’s Laces fibre Ceri bought for me my spinning wheel when I got it. And while taking pictures of the yarn on the bobbin I accidentally discovered a setting on my camera that I dubbed Awesome Yarn Shot, which does excellent close-ups. It’s so much better than the so-called macro setting, which just gives big blurs. Both those pictures are taken with the Awesome Yarn Shot setting. Go on, click View Image to embiggen the picture of the skein and see how lovely the yarn is. That’s a standard-size business card with it. (Yes, there’s a bit of variation in the grist of the yarn but hey, it’s my first Merino.)

Sunday morning we headed over to the Preston-LeBlanc household for an Imbolc brunch. Things were a bit rocky because the boy woke up at 4:30 and decided to come snuggle with us, and I didn’t have the energy to march him back to his own bed. I should have, because he squirmed and kicked and played with cats and talked and made everyone tremendously grouchy, so when he said at 5:30 that he was hungry and wanted breakfast both HRH and I had had quite enough. HRH fed him a piece of bread with some juice, and told him to go back to bed. The deal was he could sleep with us if he slept on HRH’s side of the bed and not the middle, and lay very still so that he’d actually fall asleep. This happened, thank goodness, and we all got another hour of dozing in. Once up, I made a fabulous pesto-cheddar quiche with a homemade pie shell, and off we went. I also packed up the wrap I’ve been working on for my eldest goddaughter since, what, October?, having sewn the buttons on the night before. We were greeted with mimosas and happy people, and the morning was subsequently wonderful. Our plates were full of raspberries, blueberry scones with crumb topping, and bacon, and quiche, and it was all fabulous. We made Brigid’s crosses with pipe cleaners afterward, and then we gave my goddaughter her wrap. She loved it, and I wish I’d been less tired by that point so I could have made more of a fuss over her. The new batteries I’d put in the camera that morning turned out to be dead, so I took photos with their camera and will post them when they get to me.

When we got home we fed the boy and then we all napped. After the boy’s nap we went out to pick up the groceries we needed for the rest of the week, and thanks to the encouragement of fellow Twitterers I went back and tried those shoes on. They’re so incredibly comfortable, and both HRH and the boy approved, so I bought them. And finally, we went to the library, where I collected the new Tracy Chevalier book Remarkable Creatures and the latest 44 Scotland Street book by Alexander McCall Smith, The Unbearable Lightness of Scones. And I snagged the Clone Wars Visual Dictionary for the boy, which interests both HRH and I so much that we may have to own a copy of it.

The boy clamoured for Scrabble game before dinner, so all three of us installed ourselves at the kitchen table at his direction and we played a really solid game. The boy did lose interest again after five rounds, but he brought toys into the kitchen and played while HRH and I kept going, and we played his turn for him too.

It was, overall, a lovely weekend, although I was wiped by Sunday noon.

Web-Wide Poetry Reading In Honour Of Brigid

The week of Imbolc continues with today’s Web-wide poetry reading in honour of Brigid, the Pan-Celtic goddess of inspiration and poets, among other things. Here is my offering.

    Winter Heavens
    Sharp is the night, but stars with frost alive
    Leap off the rim of earth across the dome.
    It is a night to make the heavens our home
    More than the nest whereto apace we strive.
    Lengths down our road each fir-tree seems a hive,
    In swarms outrushing from the golden comb.
    They waken waves of thoughts that burst to foam:
    The living throb in me, the dead revive.
    Yon mantle clothes us: there, past mortal breath,
    Life glistens on the river of the death.
    It folds us, flesh and dust; and have we knelt,
    Or never knelt, or eyed as kine the springs
    Of radiance, the radiance enrings:
    And this is the soul’s haven to have felt.
    ~ George Meredith

Help weave the web by posting your own poem (original or otherwise) on your blog, journal, Facebook page, line by line on Twitter, or somewhere online (who says you can’t write one out and pin it to a bulletin board at work, or tape it to your office door?) today, February 2. Leave links to it in the comments area of other posted poems; follow the other links you find online to read a vast woven web of poetry today.

Oak’s original invitation:

5th annual Cyberspace Poetry Slam for Brigid
Feel free to copy the following to your blog/facebook/website and spread
the word. Let poetry bless the blogosphere once again!

WHAT: A Bloggers (Silent) Poetry Reading

WHEN: Anytime February 2, 2010

WHERE: Your blog

WHY: To celebrate the Feast of Brigid, aka Groundhog Day

HOW: Select a poem you like – by a favorite poet or one of your own – to
post February 2nd.

RSVP: If you plan to publish, feel free to leave a comment and link on
this post. Last year when the call went out there was more poetry in
cyberspace than I could keep track of. So, link to whoever you hear
about this from and a mighty web of poetry will be spun.

Please pass this invitation on…

Hail, Poetry! Let the web be woven!

Weekend Roundup, Spinning Workshop Edition

Saturday morning I had a really good cello lesson. We worked on the Boccherini a bit, a Mooney etude, and spent the last half of the class looking at fingerings for orchestra at my request. I was rather chuffed to see that about half my fingerings were right. My teacher, bless her, has said that we’re going to have an easy recital slate because we have so much to do for orchestra. I was in a great mood when I got up, I was in a great mood there, and in a great mood when I left, which is really encouraging. The incredible sun helped a lot, I am thinking. I stopped by the Courtnell-St.Martin abode to pick up what Tal called a medieval yarn torture device, which, as I suspected, turned out to be an antique skein winder. It needs some TLC in the way of repair and cleaning, but it will be very nice once it’s back in working order. They piled me with books as I left, so I now have the first three volumes of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series to read. I then went to Ceri’s, as I had my Phat Fiber box to show her, but I was met at the door by Scott, who told me that Ceri was in bed with a bad migraine (are there such things as good migraines?), so our planned knitting meeting and tea-time would have to be postponed.

Sunday morning the boy and I headed out to the monthly pagan playgroup. After a week at home I was taking him come what may, even though he still had the occasional chesty cough. Their craft was a north/Earth collage to match the other cardinal direction/element collages they’d done: we cut out a conifer-shaped piece of green construction paper and a picture of a stag, which the boy coloured brown very carefully then glued on the tree, finishing it with a roundish dab of gold glitter above the stag. His crafting abilities have really progressed in the year we’ve been attending the playgroup. I very proudly taped it to his door to complete the elemental set when we got home.

Sunday afternoon was my Spinning 102 class with Leslie, and as Bonnie theorised would happen, I discovered that I am much more advanced than I thought I was. Although it was worth the time and money just to sit with other people and spin, and talk about the different ways we each had of doing things. I got to try fibres I’d never tried before (pure alpaca, Rambouillet, carbonized bamboo, mohair locks) and preparations I’d never tried before (real rolags, batts, the locks in a cloud), and it was so useful to have someone more experienced look at what I was doing and say that it was fine (the hand motions, not the yarn, although that was fine too!). The only really new technique I learned was spinning from the fold, and the only real ‘aha’ kind of tip I picked up was to spin it off the knuckle of the bent index finger, not to keep the finger pointed. I also reinforced that while spun bamboo looks very lovely indeed, I do not spin it very well; it is very slippery. It was, all in all, a really terrific three hours, and I’d love to do it again. I’ve never seen Ariadne Knits that full of people; there were the three of us spinning, and about a half-dozen people knitting on the other side of the store, and various people coming in to shop throughout the afternoon. Then again, I usually have the boy with me, and I deliberately choose a quiet time like as soon as they open so as to minimize potential disaster.

The other woman taking the class had a Majacraft Pioneer, and she let me try it at the end of the day. Oh, it was just lovely. It’s certainly on my list of wheels to consider if at some point I feel the need to upgrade from my basic Louet. I picked up the half-pound of Corriedale I asked them to put aside for me to take the bad taste of Coopworth out of my mouth, and the high-speed bobbin I ordered in November finally arrived, too. I’ll get to try some of the cotton, at last!

I was wandering through a Ravelry forum on Friday and discovered a link to a set of DIY hackle comb instructions (screw plastic hair picks or wide-tooth combs to a piece of 2×4, clamp to table, use!) and it finally sank in that I don’t need a drum carder in order to blend fibres. So now I’m thinking I can blend bamboo and other slippery or short fibres in with other things and make use of its properties while making it easier to spin. I’m also intrigued with the colour-blending possibilities: rather than trying to dye a specific colour, I could blend two or more other colours of fibre together on the hackle to achieve the colour I’m aiming for. A $20 DIY hackle is much less expensive than investing in a drum carder.

All in all, another good weekend. I was very thankful for it after a week home with the boy.

Monday!

Yes, it deserves an exclamation point. It is Monday, my son is at school for the first time in seven days, and it’s gloriously sunny out there. Lovely things happened this weekend, although it was much too closely scheduled and stressed me out that way, and I’m thoroughly drained from the week of dealing with a boy who was home only so that he wouldn’t pass his cold along, because he certainly had the energy to go.

The roundup will follow at some point. I hope everyone has a fabulous day.

It’s Imbolc today/tomorrow/when the sun hits 15 degrees of Aquarius, however you celebrate it. I’m going for a week-long thing, myself. We started with pagan playgroup yesterday, and lit candles to Brigid this morning and read about the things she’s associated with with before the boy went to school. So a blessed Imbolc to one and all, or Candlemas, or la Feile Bride, whatever you call it. May all your groundhogs assure you of an early spring.