Happy Holidays!

The kids and I are in Idaho, and my parents' house, as is my sister. It's darn cold here--around 20 degrees F at the moment--with lots of snow. The kids are loving it! (The pic above is my parents' British phone booth that they brought back when they moved back from England.)

The day before yesterday Gilly made a snowman:


and Ryan had a good time investigating the tree:



Yesterday was the Great Dyeing of 2010. Last year Karen and my Mom helped me dye the roving that I spun into yarn for my Bono Kimono (which just needs to be blocked and then seamed), so this year I told them I'd help *them* dye.

We dyed six pounds of roving.

The four braids on the left are my Mom's Polworth roving, and the three on the right are some of Karen's Polworth.


The pink/orange/purple on the left are Karen's merino/mohair roving, and the ones on the right are the rest of the batch of Karen's from the pic above.

Here are the rovings before we braided them:

And another gratuitous shot on the drying rack:

We've been busy indeed! :-)

ETA: I've gotten a couple of questions about what rovings are. They're basically long lengths of fiber that's been cleaned and the fibers have been aligned so that they're (mostly) going in the same direction. The proper name is actually "top" but "roving" is a more commonly-used term (although it's not correct--"roving" has the fibers *not* aligned). Here's a good explanation.

Fiber Christmas

I still need to blog about our fabulous trip to Idaho, but first I'm going to post about Fiber Christmas in July that was this Friday and Saturday.

I ended up teaching three classes (Magic Loop Socks, Common Knitting Mistakes and How To Fix Them, and Designing Your Own Socks), and I got really good reviews about all of them.

Of course I turned right around and spent almost all of the money I got from the classes. :-) This is my big fiber purchasing opportunity for the year, and as usual I might have gone a bit overboard.

This is alpaca, bamboo, and merino:


They were clearing it out so it was $2 an ounce. I got four ounces of each of the browns, and three ounces of this gorgeous 60% merino/40% bamboo fiber:

These next two I got in a Dirty Santa swap. I've never worked with pencil roving before so it'll be neat!



I fell deeply in love with this fingering-weight yarn, and it'll probably become a double-knit cowl. I just need to decide what other color to put with it, although I'm leaning toward a cream or off-white. We'll see!

I'm not sure what breed this is, but I got it from Kate at Lowder Colors Farm's stand. It's 4 ounces and really soft. It looks fairly long-stapled so it'll be interesting to spin up.


This is something I snatched out of Bridgette's hands as she was going to give it away as a door prize. It's 100% silk and luscious.


I kept wandering by one of the booths and this particular braid yelled my name:

It's merino with "sparkle" although the sparkle didn't show up in the picture. It's not like Angelina or glitz, and it's going to be another interesting spin because I haven't worked with it before.
This braid yelled at me, too, and it's merino and silk. I'm way into browns this year, if you haven't noticed. They're just pulling me. :-)

I bought a few other things but I'm not going to photograph them right now (maybe after Christmas!).

I also want to post some of the websites for some of the vendors, but that'll have to wait until I'm a bit more organized. I'm still recovering from two really, really busy days right after coming home from a busy week in Idaho. :-)

Happy Independence Day!

Happy (late) Independence Day to my fellow denizens of the U.S.A.!

I slept for most of the day (I've got a sinus infection, I suspect), and Greg took the kids out to buy fireworks. They came back with quite a haul!

Here are the kids, with their chairs in the middle of the cul-de-sac, enjoying the neighborhood display:


That's Greg on the right, lighting a sparkler for Gillian, with Ryan in the background.


They got some of the bigger fireworks, and it was cool to have them right above our heads. I got two neat shots:





I even got a picture of Greg:


This is one of our favorite fireworks. It's a Purple Rain Fountain:


They go for a surprisingly long time. The kids had a great time with sparklers, and with a really long shutter speed I got some fun pictures.


----------------------

On the knitting front, I finished a Laminaria shawl and sent it to my dear friend Kathy for her wedding, which was Friday. I don't have any pics of her (yet) but here are some I took before sending it:




----------------------

I'm participating in the Tour de Fleece again on Ravelry, and I spun up some beautiful fiber that my Mom and Karen bought for me:




The color isn't *quite* right on this pic, but it's too pretty and shiny to not share:



And here's the final collage I posted on Ravelery:


I hope everyone has had a great weekend!

We've been busy around here

As usual, it's been longer than I intended since my last blog post but we've been doing all kinds of things around here.

First up, I got two skeins of yarn spun from the roving that my Mom, Karen, and I dyed up while they were here at Christmas.

I'm very happy with it! It's exactly the weight I was trying for. I have five more braids to spin up, then I'll start the knitting. One skein has 172 yards and the second has 168 yards.


Over the weekend I updated my business website with three galleries of customers' quilts. Check them out here!

Speaking of quilts, I just finished the quilting on my friend Calista's quilt. Here's a detail shot of the rocket:

The thread glows in the dark, which you can see in this picture:

Isn't that the coolest thing ever?!?!



Greg has been really busy this weekend, too. He got a new (used, but new to him) table saw, and a new jointer. He's been working on a gorgeous fish tank stand, and he'll put the finish on next weekend.

Here's the table saw:


And the jointer:

I'm so glad he's having such a great time using them. I've given him a list of pieces of furniture I'd love to have him build. LOL!

Back to School!

The storm dumped a bunch of snow, but it hasn't shut everything down the way the last ice storm did (thank goodness).

The kids *are* going back to school tomorrow, which is great! The only bad thing is that I've managed to come down with a horrible head cold, so I'll be canceling on going to the library to process holds like I normally do on Mondays. Can you imagine how I could spread this virus, handling a few hundred books? [Not to mention that I'm not very with it at the moment.]

I took some pictures of the weather, although they're not all that much different than the ones from the last post, you can see the snow is a lot deeper. Looking at the patio set in the back, I'd say we got around 6" at least.


I'd gotten some paperwhites right after Christmas, and I was so excited about them -- until they bloomed.

It took me about a day to figure out where the really nasty week-old newborn diaper smell was coming from.

I took this picture after putting them outside because I couldn't stand the smell any more. Unfortunately they've now drooped and I've probably killed them.

Pretty though, aren't they?


Speaking of pretty, the ice on all of the trees is pretty spectacular, especially with the sun shining through the ice.


I finished Gillian's new mittens a little while ago, and she took them out for a test:

The thumbs are blue because I ran out of purple yarn. LOL! She doesn't seem to mind, thankfully.

This next picture gives a pretty good idea of just how much ice we got.


On Thursday afternoon while it was snowing I managed to spin up one of the braids that my Mom and Karen helped me dye:


I still need to ply it, but I'm going to wait another day or so until the singles aren't so energized so I don't have as many tangles to deal with. As usual, I've wound it into a center-pull ball and I'll ply from both ends of the ball. Once that's done and the twist is set, it's on to the next braid. I have five braids total, and I can't wait to get it all done so I can start knitting it up into a Bono Kimono (Ravelry link). I'm shooting for a heavy worsted-weight yarn but we'll see. According to my spinner's control card the singles is 22wpi, which might *just* be worsted once the twist is set. I could be surprised though! This is really the first project where I'm trying very hard to go for a specific weight.

Speaking of knitting and spinning, thank you Fillyjonk, Marianne, ShortOldLady, Denise, and Calista for your comments on the last two posts. :-)

I'm going back to bed now and try to sleep off this cold.

I hope you all had a great weekend!

Extra Bad Blogger - Trachtentuch A shawl

Not only have I not posted for a while, I realized that I never actually posted the finished Trachtentuch A pictures. D'OH!!

It's been a long time, so I'll do a little picture recap. (Warning: gratuitous spinning, knitting, and lace pictures ahead. LOL) I started this project in July and finished it in early September.

First, a collage of the spun yarn. I did this during the Tour de Fleece last year, and luckily my Mom bought eight ounces instead of just four because I ended up using about six ounces.

Here's the start of the shawl:



Shawl in mid-way stage (color is accurate in the first picture, and not in this one):




Shawl pre-blocking:


Blocking, detail:



Blocking, full:

It might not seem that huge, but each of those tiles is 24".

Bad pic of me in shawl:


And this is how I end up "storing" many of my shawls:


I'm thinking about using black wool for Trachtentuch B, but we'll see. :-)

------------------------------------------------------------

There's a huge storm rolling in at the moment and they're predicting that the power will go out in the next day or two. I just heard that school has now officially been canceled for tomorrow. I'm supposed to go scrapbooking tomorrow during the day and then for most of Friday night. I obviously won't be going during the day, and hopefully the roads will still be passable enough to go in the evening. Who knows!

Gillian stayed home sick from school (again) today, and she's much better than she was yesterday. While she watched a movie (Meet the Robinsons) I made a half-batch of laundry soap, so now I'm feeling fairly well prepared for the moment. That's about it for excitement around here. LOL!

Stay warm and safe!