Greetings from sunny Florida

See, I have a traveling sock just like Stephanie. Actually, it was supposed to be a Christmas present and now it's become a June birthday present. Yes, I'm that slow ...

I'm still working intermittently on the moebius scarf. It sits in the bottom of my knitting bag and occassionally gives me dirty looks.

It's beautiful here in Vero Beach. It's sunny and warm and lovely. All of us are actively engaged in doing nothing at all.

Tonight, in accordance with our tradition, we will walk on the beach at midnight and greet the new year. Happy New Year Everyone!

One more picture, just to make Kate mad. We spent a day at Disney World and Kate had to make the ultimate Disney fashion statement.

Underwater Christmas Tree Decorating

No fiber today. I just wanted to report on the fun thing the girls and I did yesterday.

Our local dive shop holds an annual Underwater Christmas Tree Decorating Contest. They sink a couple of Christmas trees in their pool and you scuba down and decorate them with plastic ornaments and tinsel. All the fees for the event go to Breast Cancer Research, so everyone benefits. Last year the girls and I were featured on the local news in full scuba gear decorating our tree!

This year there were no film crews, but we had a great time. An underwater photographer takes a picture of each decorated tree and the pictures are sent out to neutral parties for judging. We don't know who won yet, but it doesn't really matter.



Everyone has to bring their own unbreakable treetopper. Here is ours.

That glow up north? It's Canadian pride.

This post is for Celine, who just caught on to using her wheel rather than a drop spindle.

This is a picture of my first bobbin of yarn ... a lumpy bumpy mess. It's overspun in some places and underspun in others.

Your first bobbin is, by comparison, a masterpiece. Congratulations. I think you and your wheel are beginning a beautiful friendship.

Friendship Spinners Christmas Retreat

Last weekend Friendship Spinners met for our annual Christmas retreat at Shakertown. It was lovely, as usual, getting together with about forty of the nicest people I've ever met. The creativity and kindness are not to be equaled anywhere.

Naturally, we brought our wheels and we spun ... and we talked ... and we laughed and we asked each other fiber questions. And, of course, we ate. I brought a couple dozen of these springerle cookies imprinted with my spinner cookie mold. They were pretty good.

The highlight of Friday night was the Annual Parade of the Crones, a very touching (and silly) ceremony. We all aspire to be crones someday. [if you don't know, don't ask]

At last, I can share pictures of the shawl I've been working on for the shawl exchange. It's lavender suri alpaca wool spun up to resemble mohair (but much softer). I used Lily Chin's pattern for a beaded crochet shawl and worked several thousand white glass beads into the pattern and as a looped beaded fringe around the ends. Thank goodness, Nancy Reed, who received it, was pleased with it.

There was a slight mix-up with the shawl exchange, but where there's a will there's a way, especially when kind people are involved. I received a beautiful handwoven shawl that was made during a sheep to shawl event. The warp is made of Lincoln cross wool and the weft is Shetland. I LOVE it. It's especially nice because it wasn't just made by one person, it was a group effort.

A lovely time was had by all. I just wish I could spend more time with them.

The prodigal camera returneth!

LOOK! I'm visual again!
Kill the fatted calf, my camera turned up in one of the side pockets of my computer bag. I was so glad to see it!

I still can't show you a picture of the shawl I'm working on because it's a secret, but I COULD take a picture of it if I wanted to.

The kids were great in the Spinning and Dying class today -- and that's saying a LOT for middle school kids. They enjoyed petting Andy (although he didn't share their enthusiasm) and listened attentively to the history of spinning and passed around all my fiber samples. Later, one of my helpers said she was impressed with my lecture and how I held their attention. That's the kind of positive feedback I could use every day!

Ally finds out tomorrow whether she got one of the big parts in the high school production of South Pacific. Keep your fingers crossed for her. She's only a sophomore and it's unlikely that she'll get a big part, but she'd really like to play "Bloody Mary," the native trading woman who has a comic role but really good songs. Ally's been singing "Bali Hai" around the house ever since she learned that this year's play is "South Pacific." I hope she's not crushed if she doesn't get the part. I'm nervous for her.

DH gets home tonight! Hurray!

Canon may be getting some more of my business...

Look, ma, no pictures. This is not because I don't want to show pictures, but rather because I am unable to show pictures. My camera has been AWOL since the Morehead trip. I've searched the car and all my bags with a fine toothed comb and still it hasn't turned up. I loved that little thing. I'm still hoping it will show up somewhere unexpected.

So, we will struggle on without visual aids. Actually, I don't have much to show at the moment anyway. I'm making a shawl for the Friendship Spinners gift exchange and I don't want to show it just in case one of the group stumbles across my blog.

I'm looking forward to the retreat at Shakertown in a couple of weeks. In addition to a fiber-related gift exchange, they also have a more structured exchange. Last year, it was hats. I made a felted hat (my specialty) and received a lovely toque-type hat made of alpaca with the words "Friendship Spinners" worked into it. The weavers in the group exchanged woven bath towels -- but, not being a weaver, I didn't participate in that one. This year, the structured exchange is shawls, so both knitters and weavers can participate in one exchange.

My DH is still on the road. He's been in St. Louis since Thursday and should be back very late Monday night. It seems like we've been all girls here for a long time.

Tomorrow I go to R.A. Jones Middle School for the Art Links Adopt-a-School program. I'm showing the kids spinning and then we're kool-aid dying some yarn. In December, another member of the Weaver's Guild will come with her loom and show them how to weave their yarn into a colorful rug for their classrooms.

Ally is making some medieval food for extra credit in her history class. She found a recipe online for what was called a cherry tart. It uses cherries, ricotta cheese, some spices and chopped up "ROSE PETALS." It was a great excuse to buy some roses at the grocery. I can't imagine that the rose petals are going to add much taste, but the recipe specifically called for them and we added them. It smells good anyway and it's about to come out of the oven.

That's all for now. Happy Thanksgiving if I don't post before then.
(picture snagged from the Internet)

On the road again

No pictures today. I'm in the charming town of Morehead, Ky for the high school choral festival held at Morehead College. Ally's been working hard today learning music for the performance tomorrow, but for me its actually more of a vacation. All I have to do is supply transportation when the kids get out of their music classes, read, knit and watch T.V. Yippee!

God bless WI-FI and the Internet. When I was here last year I pretty much exhausted the tourism possibilities for Morehead, so today I've been online a substantial part of the day. So far I've answered all my email and bought a cashmere sweater on eBay. Life is good.

Depression reigns and we all got wet

I'm making slow progress on the moebius lace scarf. It's proving more difficult than I had thought. Although the lace pattern is very simple, the qivuit is not smooth and it's so light -- like a spider's web -- that any mistakes are VERY difficult to correct. I've finally adopted a policy of simply moving on. As long as I don't have any gaping holes (and I do mean gaping) I'm just going to call it lace. It's my interpretation of the pattern ... Ha! Qivuit deserves better, but I'd rather complete it imperfectly than never complete it at all.

Another rather depressing project is staring me in the face: my handspun socks. I made the yarn from the wool Elizabeth Ashford sent me plied with camel down. My color sense is completely colorblind. While the yarn itself looks O.K., when knitted up and seen at a distance the whole color scheme turns to mud. What spinning demon made me ply teal blue with cinnamon brown?

To make it worse, I used up all my camel on the two skeins I made and those two skeins are not going to be nearly enough for the socks. To remedy this problem, I decided to put in heels and toes of solid two-ply teal wool. Turns out that the "toes" are going to have to stretch all the way to the instep. Ah, the joys of "winging it" when you start a project. I really ought to know better. Well, I'll be spending my free time in the next few days spinning more teal yarn.

An obsession spanning both time and space.

I was relieved to read in the latest edition of Spin-Off that I'm not the only spinning obsessed person who is collecting spindle whorls. It's right there in black and white. Other people do it too. Martha Monsson's article "Touching Time," tells about her collection and shows them off. Apparently, she makes shafts for hers and actually uses them to spin.

I bought several whorls on eBay a couple of years ago from an antiquities dealer in Florida. According to the dealer they were from the middle east and about 2000 years old. I put a couple of them on leather straps and gave them to my spinning friends as necklaces. Of course, I kept one for myself and I wear it often. I usually don't share its history though because no one seems to believe me that it's 2000 years old. They all seem to think I was "taken" by a slick eBay dealer.

I was so happy to read in Martha's article that these whorls are as common as arrowheads among ancient artifacts and seldom sell for over $20. Of course, I haven't carbon dated my whorls, but I have no reason to believe that they aren't genuine.

I love to wear my whorl necklace and think it of it being used by a woman 2000 years ago to make thread for her family's clothes. It's a concrete link with women of the past and their daily tedious but important work.

So, here is a gallery of my collection to date. My hope is to collect whorls from every continent (except Antartica) and from a wide variety of time periods and materials. So far, I have spindle whorls of stone and clay. I've also seen them made of lead, glass, bone and bronze.

This is the first whorl I collected. It's made of black stone from the Middle East and about 2000 years old. It has a decorative circle around the center hole.

My oldest whorl is the Chinese Neolithic spindle whorl. It is stone and believed to be 4,000 to 4,500 years old.

The youngest whorls I bought recently in a lot. They come from South America and are early PreColumbian fired clay. Several of them have interesting markings.

Many thanks to Celine for encouraging me to post pictures of my treasures. Now I have to find a creative way to display them in my house!

A Minor Setback

As I sat in my CLE lecture -- attempting to keep utter boredom at bay by knitting on my qivuit moebius scarf -- it became crystal clear to me that the lace was never going to look right no matter how I blocked it. The number of stitches wasn't right and the pattern was full of unintended holes and it was a complete mess.

So, I spent about two hours carefully undoing all my work and rolling the precious qivuit back into a ball of yarn. Then, another two hours to cast on the nearly 400 stitches required for this pattern and make the moebius shape. Well, it gave me something to do while the lecturers droned on about how to do estate planning so that you can claim medicaid coverage when you go into a nursing home.
Now I'm almost back to the point where I had to visit the frog pond and, lo and behold, I sort of see a pattern! I think ripping it out was worth it. I put markers in every 30 stitches so I can see right away when (not IF) I make a mistake and can correct it before it becomes a disaster. Ah, patience is a virtue.

I've been combing the bunny and getting a lot of beautiful angora from him. I even carded up a batch on my Louet drum carder and, as soon as I finish spinning the gray Gottland wool, I'm going to spin up a skein of pure angora. The gray Gottland and the gray bunny go well together -- I may try to make something that uses both.

My stash runneth over ....

Last Saturday I tried to treat myself by taking a day off and going to the Wool Gathering in Yellowsprings, Ohio. I TRIED. Unfortunately, there was a family "crisis" (with a little c) that only a Mommy could deal with and I didn't get to leave for the 1 1/2 hour drive until about 3:30 -- for an event that ended at 7 p.m. Needless to say, my enjoyment of the fair was limited.

I was able to use my $25 gift certificate from the Weaver's Guild though. I bought a skein of beautiful soft cream colored sportweight alpaca and a laceweight skein of unusual silk/yak yarn. I really love those exotics! I'm planning to make a shawl for the Friendship Spinner's Christmas exchange with the alpaca, but I have no idea what to do with the silk and yak -- I guess that's the purpose of a stash.

Yesterday, my stash grew even more! I went to lunch with Lynne and -- bless her heart -- she brought me a gorgeous skein of mohair from York, England. She carried it home with her in her suitcase for me. It's a dark navy and difficult to see in the picture, but it's beautiful.

Yarns I have loved ...

Today I'm going to show you a few of the yarns I've spun that haven't gotten any air time. First, here's a picture of some sample skeins I spun just to see what they would look like. The vivid blue one is Andy combings dyed with blue Kool-Aid. I think I might use this as a cuff for some black felted mittens. I was surprised to see how even Andy's worst fur could be made into pretty decent yarn. I'm always afraid to experiment with it because it's so costly -- but these were just combings that came off when I brushed him so I felt like I could play.

Sitting beside the angora skein is a small experimental skein of Rambouillet plied with blue merino/silk top. The Rambouillet came from the first raw wool I ever bought. It was from a gray ewe that was a little older and, I gathered, something of a pet. I had no idea what to do with raw wool and everything I tried resulted in a neppy and unsightly mess. One of my friends looked at it and said to just use it as fertilizer. But I perservered. I tried combing some of it with my english wool combs and, lo and behold, there was lovely solf wool in that mess. So I took the rest of the fleece to a wool mill where the owner assured me he could deal with it. It came back to me last spring beautiful soft pale gray and ready to spin. Granted, it still has some neps, but that's in the nature of Rambouillet, and it's not nearly as bad as when I tried to prepare it. Lesson learned: it's very difficult to properly prepare fine soft wools like Rambouillet and Merino at home. In getting all the dirt out, you very likely will tear the wool up a little, creating all those little unwanted neps. For my experimental skein, I thought I'd perk the gray wool up by plying it with a strand of the blue merino/silk blend wool Jeff gave me for Christmas. I think they look good together.

Next is a skein of alpaca with bits of rayon or cotton "confetti" scattered through it. This was sort of fun to spin. All the little bits add interest. I bought the roving at the Wool Gathering. last year.

The next skein is a cautionary tale. It's a beautiful cream color two-ply wool with a melon color running through it. Unfortunately, I didn't put a tag on it and now I have absolutely no idea what it's made of. It has a little sheen, so if I had to guess I'd say it was mostly cream Romney with melon colored merino and silk mixed in. Oh, well, it's still pretty.

On the knitting front, I gratefully accepted the ounce of lace weight qivuit yarn that Mom discovered in her stash. I ripped out the 3 for 4 inches of garter stitch she had done (Shhh, don't tell her I ripped out her work!) and started on a project I've wanted to do for a long time: a lacey Moebius scarf. At the moment it looks like a total mess but I've been told to expect that with lace knitting. I'm just afraid it will STILL look like a total mess when it's washed and blocked. I done a complete pattern repeat and I still don't see a pattern. Well, at least it's a learning experience ... I keep telling myself ...

Go with the brown flow ... wait, that doesn't sound good.

I decided to "lean into" the brown with the turquoise and brown alpaca blend that I won. I spun up about 50 grams of the Ashford alpaca blend and then I rummaged around in my stash and came up with 50 grams of camel down. After spinning up the camel (which was a unique experience ... it's a short fiber but not really that hard to spin), I plied it with the alpaca blend. So, we end up with a 2-ply yarn that is 50% camel down, 35% turquoise corriedale and 15% dark brown alpaca. It looks kind of cool. Although I haven't measured it yet, it should be a sock weight yarn and I'm hoping to make socks.

Speaking of socks: Kate took her new white school socks to Washington, D.C. on her class trip and only one of them came back. The remaining sock is looking forlorn on top of the dryer, hoping against hope that its mate will turn up (and NOT after it's been washed and felted inadvertantly).

Speech after long silence ... (Yeats)

It's been a while since I've posted. The girls have gone back to school and I've started my new part-time job. See Stephanie's blog on August 25th for an accurate description of me while I'm working at home. Still, it's sort of fun to be exercising the muscle between my ears a little. I just hope I did a decent job on the memo Joe assigned me this week.

My wool from New Zealand arrived. I chose Lagoon color and I'm not sure it goes too well with the brown alpaca it's mixed with. It look nice and tweedy, though, when it's spun and plied. The alpaca gives it a little halo. I'm thinking of plying it with some soft merino and making socks.

I also finished Kate's school socks. I wish they were superwash -- I'm just sure she's going to toss them in the wash and I'll felt them by accident. I couldn't find any superwash wool in a plain bright white color. And the cotton I found said it needed to be handwashed too. So ... I tried them on and they're very comfortable. Maybe we can avoid shrinking them for at least one winter.

I'm still on the fence about this sweater. Ally thinks the colors don't go well together and I think it's a little garish. I'm not sure I want to spend a lot of time making a sweater I won't wear. Yet, when I pulled it out to take this picture, I thought it looked cheerful and I sort of like it.

Socks on Parade and New Zealand loves me

I finished my "Socks that Rock" socks. They turned out a little large around the foot, but they're fine. I love the colors. As is common with hand painted yarn, one sock is a lot paler than the other. I found this out when I made my "Koigu" socks. For a long time I thought I had accidently bleached one of the socks in the wash -- or some other accident. Then someone on one of my sock lists mentioned that hand painted yarn rarely yields identical socks. Still, they're very pretty.

The Weaver's Guild's next display is all about socks, so I've gathered together all my hand knit socks for the display. I have to take them in by August 15th. Who knew I had so many socks!

Last, but not least, I heard from Elizabeth Ashford this morning. Yes, that Elizabeth Ashford -- Ashford Spinning Wheels in New Zealand. I WON the Shrek 2 challenge! They're going to send me over a pound of their new alpaca blend wool. I'm so excited!

More socks!

I finally got around to knitting up the "Socks the Rock" yarn that I got from Toni Neal of The Fold at the Fleece Fair in 2005! Everyone on my sock list has been talking about how wonderful this sock yarn is, so I had to try it. It's pretty nice. I love the colors.

I've finally become a true sock knitter. I can knit a sock totally without a pattern now. If I ever get stranded on a deserted island, I'll be able to make socks. What a relief that must be for everyone stranded with me.

Well, one sock down. I'd better start the other one before SSS hits.

I'm also getting ready to start my Fair Isle birthday sweater now that all the yarn has arrived and the opinions have been weighed and the colors finally decided. More adventures ahead! STEEKS!