Daily Archives: November 3, 2014

Spinning October 2014

Spinzilla kind of tripped me up. I’ve been production spinning, and it took me a little while to get back into the spinning for fun groove.

The Mazurka prototype is chugging along. It’s a delightful little wheel. I ordered the upgrade parts for it, so now I have an unfinished Minstrel/standard flyer plus the Minstrel front maiden. HRH and I just need to figure out how to kitbash those into the current mother-of-all setup. The MOA may even be long enough, which means it wouldn’t need a cap or extension! It turns out the new flyer will fit into the hole in the existing back maiden (woohoo! I was concerned about the clearance for the flyer arms!), but the height of the new Minstrel front maiden doesn’t correspond. And the new maiden has a metal bolt through it all for inserting through the MOA bar; it’s not a peg, the way the existing front maiden on the Mazurka prototype seems to be, so we can’t just cut it down to size. We need to mull it over.

I’m still spinning the same blue/green rolags on it, the last 2 oz to the 2 oz I spun during Spinzilla. I think I have just about 10 grams left to go. (Pardon the uneven loading of the bobbin; I was watching a movie with Sparky this weekend and lost track of switching hooks.)

Last week I wanted to spin something on my big Symphony, too, so I pulled out a lovely braid of Merino from Daybreak Dyeworks. I won this on the Daybreak Dyeworks team during Tour de Fleece this past summer. I rarely spin Merino, actually, and I’m having a lot of fun spinning longdraw from the end of this top. This particular Merino is really spongy and crimpy, so longdraw is pretty much effortless. I’m planning to chain-ply it when it’s done. It’s going to poof up beautifully for some very snuggly worsted weight, I expect.

That looks awfully lemon-lime, I know. There’s blue in the braid as well, it’s just not visible in this layer of singles:

And last but not least, what could this be, that has just arrived via our terribly nice parcel postman?

Oh, just a truly lovely Texasjeans Tibetan-style support spindle, whorl in maple burl with a curly maple shaft, weighing 22 grams and measuring 10 inches. I scored it in a destash last week. I’ve been wanting to try support spindling for ages, since drop spindling tires me out very quickly (thanks so much for that, fibro). I also have a Russian-style support spindle by Miss Lucy P in lingum vitae coming my way, also scored in a destash. All things come to those who wait! I’m still rather stunned that I scored both of these at a time when I actually had the money to do it. The only reason I sent “yes I want to buy this is it still available” queries for both was because I thought for sure I’d lose out on one, if not each. However, the beauty of the fibre community is that if I don’t like them (weight, balance, spin speed, whatever) I can simply offer them up for sale in the same forums these were offered in originally, to pass them along to the next person. I may do that with one of my two drop spindles, actually, since I rarely use them.

Halloween 2014

Halloween happened! It was a good year for costumes.

October 1 is our deadline for finalizing Halloween costumes; no changing your mind after that. Sparky decided to go as Link from the Legend of Zelda games. I started knitting his hat on the way home from Thanksgiving, since I’d finished the knitting project I’d brought with me and had good needles for worsted weight. HRH built the sword and shield at work, cooling out lots of the kids in his programme who saw him doing it.

Owlet wanted to be Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon. For that, I initially went way overboard and started planning a full-body black dinosaur-like outfit, then mentally slapped myself for overcomplicating things. I found a pair of black track pants and a black hoodie at the thrift store, and another pair of black track pants to use as the basis for the tail. She chose some sparkly black felt at the craft store for the spikes and wings (you can’t see the sparkles in the photos, as they’re very subtle, but the rhinestones on the front of the hoodie carried the sparkle theme through quite nicely). The eyes are felt as well.

We usually go to HRH’s parents’ house for Halloween, have finger food, and then trick or treat in their neighbourhood. Well, they moved and are now ten minutes from us. We had the same plan, although we were worried about the new neighbourhood for trick-or-treating purposes. My mother-in-law said she counted only ten houses in their development that were decorated, so we figured it would be a short and sweet outing. If it was a bust, then we’d hit the hopping street close to daycare for a few houses.

It turns out the development is packed with young families! Mom never sees them because everyone’s at work/school/daycare all day. Every second house had an open door, pumpkins put out, and all the adults were dressed up. We did half of one street amid crowds of kids, then came back because the kids were cold. Next year is going to be awesome. Owlet was adorable; every time she came down the stairs from a door, she’d shout, “Mum, I got another candy!” in incredulous joy.

Everyone loved their outfits. I have to admit to a vanity here: I love it when people exclaim about my kids’ costumes. I make them so the kids love them, of course; they’re the most important people to satisfy and impress. But having people say how cute or how awesome they look gives both HRH and I a nice warm feeling. We love costuming. Someday we’ll have the time to do it for ourselves again.

Catching Up

So it turns out that I had a draft of Owlet’s monthly post that got torpedoed last month as well, and I didn’t realize it because I’m so off schedule with them that I couldn’t remember if I’d been working on one or not. Ugh. I will do what I can to reconstruct it. Which means in turn that this month’s post will be late, seeing as how it’s due tomorrow.

Halloween happened. I’ll have to write that one up, too. At least I have words from a post I made to my July 2011 mums group that I can use; I just need to resize photos and upload them.

How can I think about journalling so often and yet never actually get posts published? It’s very frustrating.