random wednesday

• I’m still spinning on my way to work most days. Yesterday morning reminded me why (aside from spindle productivity) it’s such a good thing–without it, I’m a little too likely to fret about the time, and the weather, and all sorts of other work-related things that I can’t actually do anything about until I get to lab. Especially now that I’ve messed up a second pair of earbuds so that the left one doesn’t work.

• I’ve actually done a decent amount of cooking lately. Still probably less than ideal, but I made these

a week and a half ago. The black raspberries I’d bought the day before were already starting to go fuzzy, so I picked out the icky ones, cooked the rest of them down a bit with some sugar (like jam, but not that cooked), and subbed the raspberry mixture into my standard muffin recipe (in place of the milk). The seeds were a little annoying, but they were otherwise quite good.

And I spent Sunday evening in ridiculously geeky cookery that I’ll talk about later, when the person who took the pictures gets a chance to upload them.

• There’s been a teensy bit more knitting on the Estonian lace scarf. I was thinking about photographing it with something for scale, since it was mentioned that it kinda looked like a stole rather than a scarf, but I’ll just say (for now) that it’s maybe six inches wide and knit on US1s.

• I’ve finished the first half of the merino/bamboo Sumac singles and started on the second half. It still amazes me how differently spindles spin with a full cop versus a tiny starter one.

• I finally skeined up the Jacob roving from Gnomespun, though I still haven’t (wet) finished it. It seems to be about 660 yards. Here it is with Mel, who’s wondering why I leant it on him (and maybe why he isn’t enough reason by himself for me to pull out my camera):

• I’ve signed up for the Ravelry edition of this year’s Tour de Fleece, for which I have joined Team Suck Less, with the goal of spinning a mile not in a day, because I can’t commit a whole day to spinning any time soon, but on my spindles over the three weeks of the Tour. (And the side goal of spinning fast enough for the theoretical production of a mile of singles, at least, in a reasonable length day.)

• It’s now July, and I have yet to install my air conditioners this year.  This is wonderful.

 

eye candy friday

The one real downside to this spinning-while-walking thing is that I’m a lot less likely to pull out my camera. So, today, I have two photos from April, from Fort Tryon Park:

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I went contra dancing last night for the first time in way too long. Maybe this’ll be the time when thinking “I should really do that more often” will translate into reality…

 

lace in the sun

I went up to New York this past weekend, to meet up with my parents. I also wanted to see the Fashioning Felt exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt. I was a little worried about convincing them that they’d want to go, as they’d seemed singularly uninterested when I suggested it in April, but I think their recent experience of making felt (cat-toy-like balls, at Shelburne Farms) may have changed their minds a bit. At any rate, we all really enjoyed the excursion, though I will admit to being a little disappointed by the sustainable design exhibit upstairs.  (It was okay, and there were a few particularly interesting bits, but it wasn’t as awe-inspiring as I’d hoped.)

Though most of the Felt show didn’t permit photography, I took a few pictures in the one room where it was allowed:

I’d be tempted to try to set up something like that, if I thought it’d survive for more than a few days without being a very elaborate cat tree…

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I haven’t done any felting recently, but I did add a couple more repeats to my Estonian lace scarf, and I’m getting fairly comfortable with the pattern.

(The second photo is more true to the colors.)  It’s a wee bit longer than that now, but the light on Sunday afternoon was lovely (and I’ve missed all the nice daylight since I got home).

 

eye candy friday

Crown vetch, from my walk to work last Sunday. It’s a weed, and not something I’d want in my garden (if I had one), but it’s much nicer than plain grass for an awkward hillside.

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I’ve been really busy with work this week, but I continue to spin while walking there and back. More of the rust-colored Jacob, which I hope to finish spinning next week.

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I said last week that I had some knitting to post. Here’s my most recent finished object:

It’s Cisco, with several modifications, some intentional and some less so, none of which are all that important. It now belongs to my new first-cousin-once-removed; I hope he likes it. (And, at least as important, that his parents like it.) (The yarn is superwash merino.)

I’ve been working a bit on my Estonian lace scarf, too, but I don’t have an updated picture yet. Maybe next week.

 

eye candy friday

From a walk home, sometime last week.

Discoveries re. spinning and walking: I can’t spin and carry a mug of coffee. Nor can I spin and carry an umbrella. Yet. I’ll have to work on that…

 

mostly spindle tuesday

I’ve been doing rather a lot of spinning lately, both while walking and while sitting at home. My spindles, especially, have been seeing more use than they had for a while, which seems to be a frequent effect of travel.

This is the green shetland I picked up at Spirit Trail at MDSW and started spinning by the campfire. It’s intentionally uneven, but I should note that it hasn’t been finished yet–it should look better after its wash-and-thwack.

This is a ten-yard sample skein of some zwartble I got in a swap a few months ago–about one day’s walking spinning. I like the sproinginess of the fiber and the fact that it’s so springy without being as soft as cormo. It seems like it would make a great sweater (if I had more than half an ounce or so), but I think this bit might be a smidge overscoured. (Also as yet unfinished.)

When I pulled the shetland off the Kundert, I started spinning this cormo/silk blend from Foxfire Fibre (purchased at Rhinebeck). I haven’t spent much time on it yet, but it’s very, very nice.

The primary at-home spindle project is this Sumac merino/bamboo from Amy Boogie. I’d say I’m about half to two-thirds of the way done with the first ounce.

And the current walking spindle project is this jacob from Gnomespun. My plan is a singles yarn for lace of some kind, which goes a lot faster than the finer two-ply that had been the previous wandering spindle project. So much so (along with the fact that this prep is fluffier) that I ran out of fiber halfway home on Saturday.

These next two photos, obviously, are not spindle-spinning, but it’s been very nice to get back to spinning on Amy the Lendrum, too.

This fiber is why I’d been avoiding her–it’s a gorgeous color, and really soft, but it’s full of VM. I think there’s a little still visible in this photo, and that’s after removing about one piece of VM for every four inches of singles. I need to sweep around the wheel to clear up the pile of straw and such. So I declared this bobbin done even though it’s not really full.

That meant it was time to go back to this stuff, for the other two plies for the 3-ply sweater yarn. This is cormo/kid mohair, and much more fun to spin. (Mostly because of a lower quantity of VM, but I think something else in the fiber/prep makes it easier to spin one-handed.)

There’s been a modicum of knitting, too–it might show up later this week.

 

eye candy friday

From last Saturday.

Today’s big excitement: I really can spin while walking at my normal pace. If I actually do spin on my way to work (as I did today) every not-raining day this summer, I’ll have a lot of laceweight to weave with by the time I start to weave.

 

random tuesday

• I finished reading the 20 Aubrey/Maturin novels, in only about a month. I highly recommend them. (I do read quickly, but not usually quite so quickly for so long.)

• I started knitting a sock with my superwash BFL sock yarn, and I spun some superwash merino for the baby hat that I’m going to knit instead of socks:

The yarn is from Boogie’s heather batts, in Golden Banana, but I’ve been thinking of the yarn as chocolate-mint.

• There are ducklings in the biopond!

(Turtles are out, too.)

• There are columbines in the garden around the biopond:

• I’ve been listening to a less-focused playlist recently, including a lot of music I haven’t played in the last couple of years.  I continue to be impressed by how much I associate certain songs with certain time periods.

 

zoooom!

At Maryland, I was looking around for a new spindle. I wanted one that was not rim-weighted and neither too expensive nor too light. I didn’t see anything like that, so I ordered one from Butterfly Girl Designs last week. It showed up last night, and it’s very zippy.

It seems to want to spin fine (no arguments here), so I’m spinning my Spunky merino/bamboo in Sumac. (I figure lace is a good use for 2oz of something really pretty…)

I did a bit of wheel-spinning-finishing over the weekend:

I took one of the three batts of my Cabaret Hooves and used it to try to remind myself of how to do one-handed long-draw. It worked better with a modified/supported long-draw, but it was fun to spin. It has become a graduation present for my new-Ph.D. neighbor, so she gets to decide what to do with the 160yds.

I continue to knit on my chai shawl while reading Aubrey/Maturin novels. I’m a little more than halfway through book 19, so I should be back to getting enough sleep only science and cooking and fibers keeping me up late pretty soon.

I’ve added the bud lace pattern from Swallowtail. I think I’m going to switch to something else as an edging pattern, and I’m debating about adding a black-with-sparkles bit so the shawl can be bigger. (I’ve only got the 4oz of chai, so I’m thinking maybe an ounce of black.)

 

eye candy friday

These are from the gardens at the Cloisters, taken last month.

 

maryland again

I camped at Patapsco again, with my friend Sarah.  We were both really amused by the size of the tent we stayed in–it’s officially a ten-person tent, and there were just the two of us this year, but it’s hard to argue with a free tent.

This photo is from last year, when there were three of us in the huge tent.  It’s a very different experience, camping in a tent that’s tall enough to stand up in, that has a porch, and that has room to spare even after all of everyone’s stuff is inside, instead of using a backpacking-type tent.  The only drawback, really, is that it takes up all the space in the trunk of the small rental car when you shove it in without folding because it’s raining out.  (It was a good thing there were only two of us in the car on the way back.)

I didn’t take a lot of pictures during the festival.  On Saturday, I thought, “Oh, I’ll just look at stuff today and take pictures tomorrow, when it’s less crowded and I’m done with shopping,” and then Sunday was rainy enough that I left my camera in the car.  (So there’s one photo of Sarah spinning on a charkha at the Journey Wheel booth, but that’s it.)

The bulk of my festival purchases were things I saw in the first half-hour or so, in the first row of tents.  (That is, the middle row of tents, but the first row we looked into.)

This is a ceramic turtle that I picked up for my mom for Mother’s Day.

And this is 8oz of wool/seasilk (I think the wool is merino, but it doesn’t say) from Creatively Dyed, which I think I’m going to spin as singles.

This is 4oz of cormo/bamboo in a gorgeous Tiger Eye colorway that looks even nicer in real life than in this photo.

And this (fiber, the Kundert I already had) is a green Shetland from Spirit-Trail, which I started spinning on Saturday evening.  Spinning in front of a campfire is fun, but it’s a lot harder to spin evenly without proper light.

I didn’t buy any fiber on Sunday, just a felted cat toy with a faint rattle inside–Mel likes it more than his expression in that photo would suggest–and a shawl pin that may occasionally act as a hairstick, plus some dye and some amazing honey.  I continued to try out spindles, but I didn’t find any that had to follow me home.  The one piece of equipment I tried that I really wanted was a right-hand-orifice 30″ Schacht-Reeves.  It spun sooooo smoothly.  I still want to try a single-treadle CPW-type at some point, but I figure there’s plenty of time before I have the space and cash for a big saxony.

The other big excitement was seeing a grey treefrog–that more than made up for having to walk through the rain at 4:30am to get to the bathroom.  I was slightly disappointed that I didn’t get to hang out with anyone outside my usual fibery circle, but I had a lovely, relaxed time, even with having to pack the car (and disassemble the tent) in the rain.  I need to pretend more often that I don’t have electricity–it’s not such a bad thing to go to bed early.

And, now that I’ve finally finished this post, I’m going to read for a bit and then go to bed.

 

may day eye candy

I found this in an old photo album of my grandmother’s.

Happy May, whether as labor day, à JoCo, or by Morris dancing. I’m off to MDSW this afternoon–should be fun, even if it’s wetter than the last couple of years. (Say hi if you see me there!)

 

changeover

On Tuesday evening, I finished the scarf I started in December:

It was the last week or ten days of knitting while reading that did it, I think, so it’s only a week after its intended recipient defended.

And then I started a new project in some very similar yarn:

This is also long-draw-practice handspun from Enchanted Knoll batts, in Chai instead of Harvest. It’s going to have a bud lace pattern when I get back to working on it, but I needed a totally mindless project yesterday, and I don’t mind having a stockinette top-center. (It’s a design element!  Good or not, it’s planned.) I’m still pondering edgings, but I have some time.