Back from the SLVFAFF… and a short photo session July 17, 2008

We got back from the San Luis Valley Folk Art and Fiber Festival on Sunday. We had a blast, and it was fruitful. I got a little sunburned, and my brake band broke during the spinning competition, but all in all, it was a great time.

Yesterday, there was a knock at our door and our friend Mike was standing there. We hadn’t seen Mike in a while, and decided that it was time to go out and take some shots at nature. With our cameras, of course! We headed to Fox Run Regional Park, and spent about 2 1/2 hours re-figuring-out how to use our cameras.

I came back with these:

I found them much more exciting than the product photos I took this week for our etsy store update, although those photos are just as colorful and happy.

The trip to California… March 2, 2008

Stitches West was pretty awesome; I kept getting drawn toward handdyers’ booths by the smell of vinegar and damp wool, but I was good. I only bought the one kit. I thought about Clueless a lot.. the cool colorway is really pretty, but I came out with … maybe this one? I’ll have to check the pattern. It’s in my car still, as we haven’t unpacked most of it.

We had a nice couple of days with our friend Ed, and his girlfriend, then drove down to San Diego and visited with Ben’s brother Michael. We bought sheets for our bed (a California King — a great size bed for tall people, but a pain if you live anywhere other than California, if you want sheets that are a color other than white or tan), whole wheat pastry flour — the stuff we get in CO is coarser than the coarse stuff at Henry’s Marketplace, corn meal that is a uniform smallish size, unlike what we get here which is like corn flour mixed with rustic corn meal, and Maple Syrup at Trader Joe’s (32 oz for $11, not bad when we spent $8 for a 16oz bottle here).

Overall, it was a good trip. We saw plants growing, and it was nice. Ben’s mom was growing Broccoli at 4200 ft elevation. In February. And she had harvested once already. I won’t get to plant until at least May, and I think we’re going with the stuff that actually worked last year: potatoes and carrots. We’ll try tomatoes again, too. But all of that seems like a long way away when it’s snowing and cold and windy. The trip to California helped with that somewhat, to know that something’s growing SOMEWHERE, even if everything’s dead and cold and snowy here.

I started dyeing the first of the roving last night, and have prepared 5 100g skeins of Monkey Toes for dyeing, probably on Thursday. I’ve got another 5 lbs of superwash roving to dye, another 5 lbs of merino roving, and another 8 lbs of Monkey Toes to skein and dye. If I can get over this cold, I’ll be able to get an update of the crazymonkey etsy shop this week. The “stuff we have on etsy” shelf is looking a bit thin (which is a good thing as well as a bad thing).

An alignment of the planets… February 24, 2008

We headed out to California on Thursday night, and found ourselves in Sparks, NV on Friday evening, where we finally stopped driving. Saturday morning led us San Jose-ward, and we went to a ballet with our friend Ed — Swan Lake — and then today, I ended up at Stitches West. I saw a lot of booths, and saw many people knitting, spinning, and some crocheting. I test-drove a pair of Signature Needles, and drooled on things at the WEBS booth. All I ended up buying was a kit from Philosopher’s Wool, a lovely fair isle sweater for Ben.We’re hanging out with friends today, and tomorrow… um… I don’t know. We’ll make our way down to San Diego for that leg of the trip, where we’ll find whole wheat pastry flour and sheets and corn meal.  

Happy Almost New Year… December 31, 2007

I figured if I was going to get one last post in this year, I’d have to hurry. 

Christmas was a madhouse. Imagine, a household with 2 people, 2 cats, and one dog exploding into a house full of 8 people, 2 cats, and 3 dogs. And one of those was my mother (as well as being the mother of 4 of the other visitors). I finished the stockings, just barely, with the help of my husband (who knit about 2″ on the top of the leg and the lip of one sock) and my sister-in-law (who knit 2″ on one sock, then its lip, and about 8 purl rounds on the other). No photos, as the stockings have all been appropriated. 

We had fun, don’t let me fool you. We played on the wii until our arms fell off. We visited the Celestial Seasonings factory, and did the tour. We all got and gave cool gifts (I gave some handspun alpaca to my alpaca-obsessed sister-in-law), and had a good time. It was just stressful. Mostly because mom… well… sigh. To start with, she wasn’t pleased with our tree once we put all of our ornaments on. We ended up going to JoAnn, where she bought some sort of gold and green and red garland, some plastic balls, and some twisty thingies to add to the tree. The twisty things will get packed. The garland and cheap plastic ornaments got tossed. (We had about 4 boxes of glass ornaments on the tree, btw. And our normal assortment of weird things, and a garland, and lights. It wasn’t bare. It was fine.) 

To continue the mom weirdness, she complained about being ‘nauseous’ and ‘not feeling well.’ I’m 99% sure this is because she wasn’t drinking enough water. I live at an altitude of 6700 feet. She lives pretty much at sea level, being less than 3 miles from the sea. I gave everyone a refillable water bottle, but she never touched hers. Because, I quote, “flat water makes me nauseous.” Yeah, my head almost exploded, and I started thinking about the Louis Black bit about “if it wasn’t for my horse…” She woke me up the day after she got in at 8am, asking for breakfast, and then proceeded not to eat any of it. In fact, she didn’t eat anything I made until Christmas Day, when I made a pot roast. We *did* have Chick-Fil-A once or twice while she was here, as we’re from the South, and there are none in Maine, where she lives, or NYC where my brother and his wife live.

On the knitting front with mom, I taught mom how to cable (and wrote her a simple pattern with two C4F’s) and how to kfb. Yes, I taught mom how to increase. She already knew k2tog, and I got her started on a garter-stitch diagonal scarf thingy. I wrote her a pattern out for that one, too, on the back of some envelope or another. We went on a mini-crawl and visited the Llama store, Green Valley, and Needleworks. We stopped off on the way back from old Colorado City at Sparrow Hawk, the kitchen store downtown, and it was awesome. This was also the trip we made to JoAnn, and I want to say we stopped off somewhere else as well, but I can’t remember. It’s all still a blur.

It was a lot of fun, but I’m looking forward to next year when it will be me, Ben, the dog, and the cats. And maybe some friends if we’re up to it. No flying, no schedules, no dog fights (yelling, mostly, not actual fights with teeth and blood), no driving to the airport at 4am, etc.

On the fibery front, I entered a swap on Craftster to make Art Yarn, something which I don’t normally do. I received a box of treasures from my partner:

and it looked like this once I removed the gorgeous batts: 

Here it is on the bobbin — MJ, do you have a proper photo of it all skeined up and fluffy? It has big glass beads in it, curlicues of locks trapped in the plied yarn (which was plied around a core of crochet cotton in green), and coils, where I let the spun yarn ply loosely around the core of crochet cotton and then smushed it together.

 

It turned out awesome, but I didn’t know what I would ever knit with it. So I brought it to KnitGroup, and sold it to MJ, who had fallen in love with it at first sight.

Because the idea of knitting more socks right now is thoroughly unappealing, I’ve started a 4″ square project. I’ve been knitting 4″ squares (corner to corner, in garter stitch) and crocheting them together. I don’t believe in making new years’ resolutions, as I think that people should set and work for goals all year round, so I’ve got nothing on my slate pertaining to that. I just wish everyone good health and good luck in the coming year.

One of the coolest things that’s happened lately… June 3, 2007

One of the coolest things that happened was that the Llama store asked me to teach their drop spindle class. They called a couple Saturdays ago, I put together a document and taught the next Saturday.

I had 2 great students, and we had a great time. They got spinning, I got good reviews as a teacher, and I was invited back to be the regular drop spindle teacher.

This got me back into spindling, both making spindles and spinning with them. I’ve also gotten back to spinning with my wheel — 168 yds of plied shetland/silk/angelina, and 3 full bobbins this week.

Knitgroup was great this week; I’ll have to post the pics that MJ took of my wyvern sock, as it looks great on a foot. Odd how 3-d objects make socks look better.

Leaped to WordPress… and an update May 27, 2007

I decided to take myself over to wordpress, to take advantage of its stability, and to change my blogname to something more appropriate. I’ve started woodturning again, as the weather has finally more-or-less stabilized, and started knitting again.

My Fair Isle Sweater is in time-out, and I sprained my ankle about two months ago and stopped knitting for a while. I’ve got a single pair of socks on the needles, but not much else.

Oh, and I started  teaching drop spindle classes at the Llama store. My first class, 2 weeks ago today, went rather well, and I was asked to come back and teach this class as its regular teacher.