Sunday, July 30, 2006

No Catchy Title Today, But Pictures!


Here is the promised pictures of the "not so solid purple" dyeing snafu from a few weeks back. I almost carded it today without taking pics of the fiber first, but decided against carding anything today. I'll have to come up with another name for the "colorway" as "not so solid purple" is getting tiresome to type. ;) I do think that for an oopsie, it still came out nice. I'm to spin this up for Mom as she called dibs on it when I was telling her about the whole thing. This will probably be the next thing on the wheel as I can work on it while I'm prepping for Melissa's slipper project. I think that the colors either split due to too much lanolin still on the fiber, or mistakes in my dyeing set up. It could be one or two different things there....like too much fiber for the dyebath pot....or not close enough monitoring of the temps. As I remember it was a blazingly hot day and I'd been working in the yard all morning, so who knows how I messed it up. I hope all my mistakes come out this pretty. It reminds me of cartoonish winter. You know? Like animated winter scenes where they make the mountains purple and the ice light blue to show how ccccolddd it is? lol It's a goodly amount of fiber though, so Mom should be able to make some thing out of it. I'll get a pic of the finished yarn, and then one of her project when she's done.



This is the absolutely fabulous Corridale that I recieved in the last Spindlers exchange. As you can tell, I could not restrain myself and moved it to the wheel to work on. The lace weight spindle that I received in the exchange works wonderfully but I'm an impatient creature and want to start knitting it. lol. Well, I was curious if I could spin as thinly on the wheel too. I discovered when I started the second bobbin of it that it wanted to break at very frequent and frustrating intervals. When I compared to the first bobbin I noticed that I was spinning it so much finer than the original and think I just got it too fine. As soon as I bulked it back up to the other size the problem went away. Now I'm spinning paranoid that it will ply up too bulky to be a lace weight! (I really need to order that spinners gauge! lol. It's not like it's expensive.) It's stopped "talking" to me about being a yarn and has moved onto what kind of "lace" it wants to be. Right now it has such a flame colored blend to it, I'm almost tempted to see if there is a flame patterned shawl out there. It's very soft and I really can't wait to see it plyed up and see how much yardage I end up with. I'll probably not end up with enough for a shawl with my luck! (It will become a scarf then cause I'm a knitting this stuff up!)

On the fiber washing front....I've not washed any in almost a week. All the fleece from last weeks washing frenzy has dried and came in the house for packaging luckily before it rained.(I'm so terribly happy it rained! We really needed it. Granted it dried up and the sun came back out this afternoon, it was nice to wake up to wet and cool for a change.) So today Don and I went and saw a movie and picked up bags for the Foodsaver so I could start packaging up this stuff. Total packaged (of this stuff) to date is 22.5# of Border Leicester, some brown...mostly white. ( I just found out this week that it's Border Leicester. Which explains why it's so nummy to work with!) I'm sure the weather will clear up and get warm again and I'll be able to get some more washed. I may be "gifted" a dirty but FREE Llama fleece soon. Seems a customer of mine throws the stuff away. lol. I love that! We'll see if it shows up or not. I'm not holding my breath as I'm not sure my luck is quite that good. lol

"Now for Something Completely Different!". The new neighbor is a muscian and also fixes musical "things". On the 4th of July I told him my sorry tale about wanting to learn to play my viola but thinking I need lessons as I'm just not able to get a sound out of it that doesn't alarm the cats. He offered to look at the viola to see if it was set up properly and I completely forgot about it until last week when he brought it up again. Seems he was in a slow spot and needed something to do. So....I took him my viola and Don's violin and left it up to him. A couple of days later he returned them and said that I should be good to go. Seems I set mine up incorrectly (suprise!) and our bows weren't seasoned enough (another gasp of disbelief!). He fixed us up terrifically and I'll be on my way soon. When we got these instruments they were brand new off ebay and we really didn't know enough about them to get them set up properly ourselves. lol. So anyway, I went into the house and took out said viola, laid the bow across a string and pulled.....AAAHHH! A sound. A proper sound. A note even! Don't ask me which one, as I havn't gotten that far yet. But I will. I plan on taking a bit of time, a few times a week to practice and learn the fingerings for this wonderful toy. I can play woodwind instruments and know how to read music, so this, in theory shouldn't be too bad. I'm excited again about it and we all know what happens when I get excited about a new project. TOTAL IMMERSION! lol Naw, but I do want to do this, so I think I'll make time for it.

There has been knitting progress, just nothing exciting enough to post about. I'm itching to start a new project to work on between bouts of working on the socks. Something lacey....we'll see. I'm not ready to work on the sweater yet as I still havn't decided on the yarn for that. Why do today what you can put off till tomorrow?

1 comment:

Sydney Harper said...

I really like your not so solid purple fiber. Sometimes very good things come from mistakes.