Why this Weekend Sucked and Didn't Suck Alternately.

AKA....Knowing how to make the best of what ya got!

Well lets see, where do I start? Last week the Boss was on vacation and that always makes for a long week. That being said, by closing time on Saturday I was well ready for 1) a glass of wine. 2) a place to put my feet up and 3) a day off! So after the dinner chores were done, easily enough as the hubster is not a picky eater anymore (and was exhausted himself from having fun all day. ;) ) I sat down with my wheel and my fiber and spun on the white sticky mess that I brought back from Julies. Notice how when I brought it home a few posts back it was a large bag of spinnable wonderfulness and now its a "white sticky mess"?! After spinning up 2.5 singles of this stuff, aiming for a three ply, my hands were hurting from working with it and it was a bear to spin. Not what I'm used to at all. lol. It did give me something to work on on Saturday night though. I did consider knitting, but the Mojo was not to be found.

Sunday is normally a day that the hubster and I enjoy together. We get up, go out to breakfast, go for a wonderful ride together, etc, etc. Yeah. Sunday dawned gloomy. Not riding weather. Secretly my heart was happy as I had plans for a gloomy, wet, rainy day. We went to breakfast and discussed the fact that he wanted to go shopping after breakfast. Yep, you read that right. HE wanted to go SHOPPING. Weird I know! It turned out that he needed to get a couple of pairs of khaki pants for work (stupid new dress code to be enforced) and was wanting to pick up a GPS unit, such as a Garmon or a TomTom. As he had worked 6 days a week, three weeks in a row, one of which was over 65 hrs. I figured he could buy what he darned well pleased. ;) Besides, he does our finances and knows what we have money wise, not I. lol All that being said we ate our breakfast and headed off to the bowels of hell, aka. Wally World, aka. Walmart. Now I am known to shop there occasionally, but I absolutely hate it there. I HATE large crowds and crowded shopping venues. I will not go into the minor details of our trip that piled on and on to cause me to become a mean tempered, swearing she-devil by the time we left there but suffice it to say it had something to do with non-English speaking customer service reps(huge pet peeve here), being allowed to carry $40 worth of merchandise around the store, but having to pick up my $14 bottle of perfume at a special register and really I just don't do well in large warehouse type stores with lots of people so all these little things probably aren't anything at all but stress reaction. Call it over stimulation. Call it too much caffeine. Call it what you want. I call it the Bowels of Hell. Anyway, we escaped without injury (causing or receiving), legal fees and with his pants, my perfume and the TomTom.

Our trip home was quick and uneventful other than when we "confused" the TomTom. As we where headed home, I tore it out of it's package, plugged it in, did a fast-fix-it-the-way-you-want-later set up and plugged in our home addy for it to "lead us home" to test it. Well it did dandy and like all new parents we said, "WOW!" and "Look at that!" and "I can't believe it just did that!" That is until we decided to take a detour, off the map, to get videos on the way home. Then we had the whole parent of a teenager moment. You know, where you sit and giggle and say, "It'll never figure out what we did now!" But sadly, it did. Yep, our TomTom is smarter than us. Sad. But wait! Isn't that why we bought the blasted thing?!! Yessirebob! So this is a good thing!

Well we get home and it's fixing to pour rain like you wouldn't believe and I'm thinking "YEAH!!!! I'm throwing some laundry in the wash, setting up some dye pots and sitting down to spin me some yarn!" And thus I did. I give you proof!

This is Scarlett and Gun Metal dyeing up nicely. I've just this week ordered me a new SS stock pot through work (at a discount) to be my replacement dye pot for the one on the left. That pot is aged enough that occasionally stuff like fiber gets caught on the bottom of it. Not a good thing in my book.

So here's Miss Scarlett dyeing up with a flash photo. Yep another red. I'm not sure why I bought 3 red dyes, but it's a color that will get used a lot here, so that's all good.

Here is my new love! Gun Metal. For some reason I was completely expecting it to be a grayish color. Yes I did get the color sample page, but this on the page looked different to me. I was absolutely awestruck at it's beauty. I even had to get the hubster to confirm for me that it was a Gun Metal Blue.....not grey! WOO HOO! I'm so liking this color that I've already built in my head a couple of fantasy colorways to blend this into. I just need to write them down before I forget them!

So while the laundry was landry-ing and the fiber was dyeing, I was spinning up the white stuff that sucks and watching a movie with the hubster. I finished the singles while the first movie was playing and plied during the second movie. I did manage to get the yarn washed during the third (while I started to spin the Brown-Julie's-machine-carded-beautifully-and-it's-not-sticky-at-all-cause-it-was-cleaned-properly) but took no pics if it yet. I will when I dye it.

When we first sat down to watch the movie, Abbie kept trying to get me to sit down and knit. She pestered and cajoled. She climbed up and rubbed against my legs. Finally she gave in and climbed into the wool basket and inside the bag of wool. We've got several pictures of this, from several angles. lol


All in all Sunday wasn't too bad. The rain sucked in the respect that there are not too many more weekends for us to take day long rides this year. However, I really, really needed a wet dreary weekend to spend playing with the fiber again!

I have Mondays off now, so they officially count as weekend for me. Monday I decided that I was going to go to deliver the skeins of Alpaca I spun to the owners of Squire Creek Ranch. I phoned and left a message to see if they would be home. I then spent the morning on chores and such. I decided it was time to wash some fleece that have been soaking. How long do you soak yours? Well I don't usually wait this long but this one had time to sprout!

Kinda scary actually. This one was a small amount of leg/neck fleece from an alpaca and had been soaking as it was pretty dirty. It's almost done washing out now and I'll show you it all done up. (The picture quality is really bad. Sorry for that) I've seriously never sprouted a fleece before. lol

Part of Monday's "chores" was dyeing some more fleece. I determined that the bag of nasty sticky fleece would be re washed and then dyed. I wasn't spinning anymore greasy sticky white fleece. An wow! What a wonderful decision that was!

This is chestnut. Wonderful warm brown!

And Sky Blue. Woo Hoo!

And here's Salmon!

One of the wonderful things about this experiment is that I'm getting such vivid beautiful colors with a specified measured amount of dye. I know I can adjust these colors by adjusting the amount of dye used. It's truly exciting for me as I'm not just seeing each color, but the potential for each color as well!

While I was waiting for these colors to dye up I decided to sit down with Abbie and knit a bit. I wasn't in the mood to knit on a sock so I decided to wind up a skein of Red Hat yarn I bought for Mom and cast on. I know it's safe to talk about it here as she doesn't have Internet yet and no one who reads this will tell her about it. I bought a few skeins of Red Hat yarn from Knit Picks last year with the intention of making her a shawl or wrap out of it for Christmas. Well life and time got away from me and it didn't get done. Now I'm planning for this Christmas, or if not, her birthday is in February. So yesterday I picked up a simple lace shawl pattern, wound up the yarn and cast on. The knitting Mojo was back!

I give you a pic of the first attempt at three repeats as I'm pretty sure I'll be ripping this out to restart. I think I'm doing my yarn overs incorrectly in the lace sections and that's giving me a "different" look. It would be alright if I were consistent about it because then we could call it a "pattern modification" and I could just continue it through the whole thing. Unfortunately I think I'm doing them differently each lace section, so it just looks odd. lol Oh well. At least I can see definate lace sections, however odd they look lol I'll look up how to do the YO's again and practice a few more repeats before I rip back and restart. I'm finding it soothing to knit with the lace weight on small needles and the lace pattern isn't driving me insane. It in itself is soothing. This is a MAJOR improvement from last year when I couldn't even cast on in lace weight. VBG. I'll most certainly be posting on this again and at that time will give the pattern details. I just wanted to say..."But look....it's lace!! I CAN!"

At this point in lace making I had to set it aside to deliver the yarn. It's approximately 1.5 hrs from my house to the Ranch, so the plan was to drive up, drop of said yarn and head to the grocery store on the way home. I arrived at he Ranch with no problems. Handed over the yarn and thanked them again for the gift of the fiber. Spent a few minutes looking at the group of nearby Alpaca and then got in the car to head out. Only. The. Car. Wouldn't. Start. It was dead. No clicky clicky. No turn over. No radio. Nutin! Not even enough juice to move my automatic seat belt. I hadn't even been there 10 minutes!!! I was so embarrassed! They kindly hooked me up to a charger after I checked everything I could think to check including fluid levels. lol After about 30 minutes it still wouldn't start, even on a quick start setting. We ended up borrowing jumper cables (yes I own some, they were in the truck!) and jumping the car. Did I say how embarrassed I was?! Needless to say I drove straight home. No stops. Ironically it died in the driveway just after crossing the threshold. I had to push it about 3 inches to get the gates closed so Tucker could get off his tether. Wow! I should have tied him to the front and let him pull it! lmao. I figured it was the alternator and called the hubster who brought one home with him, but within 3 minutes he figured out it was the battery. He replaced said battery today for me (I drove the truck as it was raining for a bit and I still had groceries to get!) and I should be good to go tomorrow. What a stressful ride though! I spent that hour and a half on the way home figuring on how I could buy a new car and then what fencing I'd have to do to keep Tucker from climbing on said new car! Good thing this one's fixed. Now I don't have to do that extra fencing. lol

Ok and at this point, you've read this far in hopes of finding a pic of Tucker. This weekend he was NOT so helpful in the taking of pictures and I've got nothing for ya. Sorry. I do have a story about him that I'll try to post soon....with some pics and I've got another post on a hike/ride we did last weekend. I'll try to get all this done this week as we've got a big weekend planned for next weekend.

I hope all is well with you and yours. If the current weather is anything to go by, I'll have more time to post soon. :( But at least this will get back to a craft type blog again. lol