Taking inspiration as it comes

Wash: "Would be you get your most poetical about your pecker"
- Firefly, "Heart of Gold"

Or, in my case, when it comes to toilet humour. At this point in my life, I just go with it. Take the inspiration when it comes and all that.

A few days ago, I woke up with this song in my head. No reason, but there it was:



I started to get dressed, and within about 10 minutes, had new lyrics for the chorus. I feel the world is a lesser place without them in it, so I will share.

----
A Single Pair
(sung to the tune of "I've got a lovely bunch of coconuts")

I've got a single pair of underpants;
The loneliest underpants you've ever seen.
Sad ones, grey ones, elastic giving way,
don't really fit, I hesitate, but there's nothing else that's clean!

I'm down to a single pair of underpants.
Riding up my bum in uncomfortable ways.
Fit me like a thong, shifting 'round the whole day long,
Roll the quarters up, it's laundry day.

Words and signs, signs and words.

Pretty much sums it up, right there.

How to describe April and May? "Over" is the best I can come up with. My routine goes something like this: Wake up. Stare at screen. Make coffee. Stare at screen. Type a sentence. Make more coffee. Delete sentence you just typed. Stare at screen. You get the idea. Work is happening, slowly, at its own pace. I'm not entirely pleased about that pace, but I take it as a sign that some words aren't ready to come out yet.

There hasn't been much knitting, either. I've hit a bit of a slump on that. Plugging away on a scarf for myself. This picture is from late April, when I'd just started it. It's getting close to done now:


How to waste an hour without really trying: coffee, camera and knitting.

Mixed in with all the boredom and daily grind, though, there are signs of movement:


Fluevog feets are happy feets. You probably can't tell, but those are the infamous 'Angry Pink Bear' socks. His 'H' is not for 'happy.' His 'H' is for HATE.

There are also signs of spring:


How much did this swan care that I was there? Sweet F. A. comes to mind.


Double exposure of Impossibly Red Tulips in Christie Pits park.

And, being Toronto, there are signs of awesomeness:


Words to live by.

Sometimes, words are hard. I'll take what I can get.

Sometimes Lazy Days. Sometimes Not So Much.

I keep meaning to post, and then I realize I haven't taken the pictures, and then I put it off, and then suddenly it's a week later and I haven't posted. This has happened more than once. Bah.

See, I have this new camera. I mostly like it, except that the only documented way to get pictures off of it and on to the Mac appears to be through iPhoto, a program which I dislike, intensely and almost unreasonably, since it 1) forces me to upload everything currently on the camera, whether I want to at that moment or not (for instance: I only want to deal with two small pictures right now, not spend 30 minutes waiting for iPhoto to chug and churn to upload 7 GB of video), and 2) decides all on its own where to put files on my hard drive. Putting the pictures where I want them involves extra steps of digging through the hard drive to find the right directory and moving things around manually.

The whole process is unnecessarily complicated and drives me batty. I wish I could just plug the dratted thing in and have it show up as an external hard drive, like my old camera (ca. 2000, only takes 15 second videos, needs a new battery, but which I know like the back of my hand and love). All of this means I can no longer deal with pictures quite as efficiently as I'm used to, so it's become yet another thing to avoid. I suspect I have a solution though, which I will try out this week.

Bloody technology, thinking it knows what's best for me.

ANYhow.

It's been a mostly lazy couple of weeks. The sun is shining and it has been getting warmer each day. Dare I guess that it might be... spring? The magnolia tree seems to think so. It's now full of pink buds.

Some progress on no-longer-secret-project #3. The recipient knows about it, and has happily approved the yarn, colour scheme and pattern, so I think it's safe to say that this blanket will be for M. & C.'s Wiglet (i.e. baby), who, in fact, decided to make his grand arrival in Canada just over a week ago, after keeping parents and midwife on their toes for several days. But all are well, and he is as adorable as expected.


A big welcome to the week-old young Mr. R., aka Wiglet, who I met Friday.

I'm almost halfway done and speeding up a little, especially now that I've finalized the moon and star charts, weaving in ends as I go. In a strange way, I'm enjoying all the balls of yarn hanging from the back, which slowly but surely become tangled as I change colours. I carefully untangle them, knit a few more rows, and do it again. It's like a little dance between me and the yarn. A very pleasant, slow dance.

A couple Saturdays ago was spent in the back corner of my dusty basement with several SCA friends, sorting through a pile of canton common property, counting, consolidating, re-packing, tossing junk, and creating a photo-database of everything. There was wine and Dooley's and laughter along with the friends, which I think is the best way to spend an afternoon and evening. The inventory was well overdue. It was a big job, and in the end we completed what we set out to do, and felt like we accomplished a lot, which is the best outcome one can ask for, don't you think? Especially with wine.


Now taking up only 1/3 less space, and we know what's in every box.

Last weekend was spent making mini-heddle weaving kits using tongue depressors, sticks, glue and a Dremel. I've been wanting to try this out since seeing something similar last summer. Basically, it's the heddle portion of a rigid heddle loom. No frame. C-clamp each end of a not-too-long warp to something and weave away. Great for making narrow warp-faced bands, as you can see, and I think a little less troublesome (and less expensive) than an inkle loom or card weaving. A lot of patterns can be created using pickups. I demonstrated the technique to one of my local SCA cantons Monday evening.


A small strip of warp-faced weaving on the mini-heddle loom, and the current movie to feed the ongoing fixation.

Finally, with the impending spring, I will soon venture out into the gradually-greening backyard. The yellow tulips are long since open, and the magnolia tree is probably less than a week away from being in full bloom. I haven't raked all the dead leaves from last year, so much of the back yard remains a mushy mess. Stay tuned for an upcoming new installment of...

Weird Things We Find In Our Yard

I swear I'm not really a dyer, Part 3: Onion skins, and What the heck has she been doing all this for, anyhow?

Apparently, 'tis the season to wind yarn off the spindles, ply and make skeins. Over the last several weeks I've skeined a surprising amount of yarn.

For a friend who is doing a special cross-stitch project using only my naturally-dyed handspun:
- 10 yards single-ply of the green I made by overdyeing some (purchased) onion skin/tin yellow roving in the indigo vat.
- 25 yards single-ply of weld-dyed yellow.
- 20-25? yards of single-ply white (undyed) DorsetX.
- 20-25? yards of single-ply deep blue indigo-dyed DorsetX.


She is still using the white and blue, but will give me back what she doesn't use

This weld yellow was too light for the piece - it looked nearly white next to the dark blue - so I combed out some white DorsetX rovings and did a small onion skin with alum+tin dyepot last weekend in order to try and replicate that deep orangey-yellow of the roving I bought from Brush Creek Wool Works in August. In a fit of impatient insanity, I cooked it on my kitchen stove without a face mask, inhaling a little too much heavy metal tin fumes, so I had a sore throat the next day. This is the project that I also need to make black for. I'm still working on that, but it will require cooking wool in iron sulfate. That is definitely an outside project. Just say no to heavy metal poisoning.

But Holy Crap, did I ever get yellow. It is sunglasses-worthy yellow. I left some in the tin afterbath a little longer (like, 20 minutes instead of 10) and also got some that's slightly oranger:


Someone suggested I name it "I lost years of my life so you can have this Yellow." Done.

Also, for yuks, I took some of the accidental teal that I made when I put the light weld-yellow into the indigo vat for too long, and threw it into the onion skin/alum+tin exhaust bath to see if I could bring it back down to green and replicate what I made with the purchased bright yellow roving:


Woohoo!

Also, I andean-plied a whack of 2-ply yarn to go to another friend for a different (but not unrelated) special embroidery project:


- 28 yards (56 single-ply) of the overdyed green.
- 8 yards (16 single-ply) of the deep blue indigo DorsetX.
- 48 yards (96 single-ply) of white (undyed) DorsetX.

And then there are the other things I've taken off the spindles, all in the last couple weeks:



- 103 yards more of the black superwash merino/tussah silk blend that I want to make into a lace shrug. Total so far: 461 yards. I'll definitely have 600 yards of singles once I finish this last batt.
- 148 yards of a light blue merino that I bought ages ago from Lettuce Knit - I think it was leftovers from one of their spinning classes, so it was probably dyed by Laura (Cosmic Pluto). I bought at least 200 grams, and have not even spun a quarter of it. I'm going to have several large skeins of this stuff. No plans for it yet, though.
- 18 yards of raspberry/pinkish cochineal, the resulting rolag of an early carding test on the first two batches of cochineal-dyed wool. This is all I have of this, it will probably remain a keepsake skein.
-163 yards of light green probably-merino (Eucalyptus/tin) bought at Pennsic in '06. Also no plans yet.

Yikes! That's a lot of spinning, plying and skeins for someone who doesn't have a wheel. And now I have a whole bunch of empty spindles. Whatever will I do?

Oh, I'll think of something.


A bouquet of spindles in their natural habitat

The grass and sunlight are woven in for free

I'm home from Pennsic. This year I camped in a new location with a different group. (I-79 side of the Serengetti rather than on Runestone Hill). Being with a small group was quite a bit different compared to the 40+ people in my encampment last year, but I did miss the other group a little. Our encampment was so quiet. Well, OK, quiet in some ways. I haven't completely passed judgement on the location, but I could definitely have done without the almost constant air horns and jack brakes from the highway.

However, it was nicely flat (a bonus, seriously), shockingly convenient to the merchants, main food court and A&S tents, and I did not miss climbing the steep part of the hill every day. I did miss the sound of drums coming up from the lake all night long, though, and the feeling of being more at the centre of things. I'll have to wait a couple months until it's in long-term memory before I decide if I liked the good parts of it enough to camp over there again.


This was taken shortly before tear-down, so the camp fence and lanterns are already gone.

I played in a very excellent pickup dance band from Sunday through Tuesday. I'm still not a spectacular recorder player, but I'm starting to be able to hold my own on melody and play most things up to speed, which makes me happy. I still need a lot of work on recorder, though.

At heart, I suspect I'll always be a brass player. I believe I want need a sackbut. Possibly before the natural horn. Some day.

I was pretty good about not buying too much. I did have to pick up the obligatory spindle:


Yes, it's a heart. Yes, the pink felt baggie came with it. It would make me sick if it weren't so darn pretty.

...and the traditional couple of bags of naturally-dyed roving from Brush Creek Wool Works.



I had to get the red. Their cochineal red with tin mordant is almost exactly the colour we got. In fact, these were the reddest bags of the batch - the rest of her selection were noticeably lighter. I suspect the evenness of her colour compared to ours is because she dyes rovings, not raw fleece of questionable cleanliness. Her cochineal with alum mordant roving was close to our raspberry batch. It makes me feel considerably better to know we got what the pros get with our cochineal dyebaths. Oh, and that yellow? Onion skins with tin. Really, how awesome is that? Onions are the new neon.

I also picked up a pretty thing for my hair, a tiny hard leather pouch, two small handbound leather journals (with handmade paper! and refillable! one for me and one for Daniel to use as a sketchbook), some herbs for a friend and tea and honey - nothing to break the bank. No looms this year, thanks, and I even passed up on the expensive but lovely closed-toe shoes. I walked past the harps and sighed.

Once again, Dread Viscountess Seelie offered rigid heddle weaving classes, so a lot of my second week was spent weaving and generally playing with string. This year we were re-creating several specific archaeological textiles on the rigid heddle loom, using the multiple-heddle technique she taught last year. A few of us offered up our looms as teaching looms, so in all we had five looms going with different warps. We all wove a few inches on each pattern. All designs were woven on standard 20" Beka SG-20 rigid heddle looms, using either two or three heddles as required (3 or 4-shaft patterns), and no pickup sticks.

First a 1-2 Rippenkoper. This is a three-shaft design, requiring only two heddles. Basically, it switches between a 2-1 twill and a 1-2 twill, weft-faced to warp-faced, and also reverses.



Next, a rosette twill. This is 4-shaft design, done using three heddles.


I think this might actually be the back, but I like this side better.

And finally, my absolute favourite, the Jorvik 1336 (i.e. "Coppergate") textile. A honeycomb, or wabengawebe with a twill. I messed up the pattern more than once, being highly distractible on a good day, even more so there. A couple times I only did one repeat of the pattern, and once I did three. But I definitely want to make some long pieces of this one and do something with them.


Front of an apron dress, perhaps? Hmmm.

There was also a loom with a standard 4-harness twill warp, but since I did the twills and double-weaves last year, I didn't do more of those. One of the looms had to go back with its person early and we ran out of time, and since I was planning to put that very warp onto my loom at home, I was asked if I could weave up 5-6 samples to send off to the instructor and others in the class. It's definitely no hardship! I'm learning a lot, and getting the warping experience I was looking for.

So, now on my loom and weaving up nicely, a 2-1 Lozenge. This one is another three-shaft pattern, so it only requires two heddles.


Sample one of five. Or maybe six.

There really is something to be said for sitting under a sun shade, warping looms with a group of women, chatting with the person across from you, muttering the count of the warp thread quietly between sentences... "Here's the three. So, did you guys get wet last night? No, I was very dry - two fours coming through - but it was freaking cold when I woke up at three in the morning. Is that sixteen? OK, tie that off."

Someone might have caught a video of Seelie weaving in one of the classes, in which case I'll definitely post a link. Most of the drafts for these patterns can be found at the complex weavers medieval textiles study group, in the section on the textiles discussed in Lise Bender Jorgensen's book. The Coppergate textile draft is from Thora Sharptooth's site.

Aside from the RH weaving, I didn't take too many classes - one exception being a viking wire weaving class. I got to make a necklace, and wire-wrap a bead. I need to finish it with a hook for it to be completely done - but the part where you pull it through the drawplate is so much fun. It's like magic.



What do mean you don't go to Pennsic to weave?

I leave you with this. It was visible from Currie Road, near the west gate.


Everyone goes to Pennsic, didn't you know?

Seeing red. Finally.

Some friends and I are seeing red. We have been dyeing with cochineal, repeatedly, and with mixed success. I don't think we quite have this cochineal thing down yet, but we're getting better. Um, maybe.

The goal: Enough red wool to spin 1400 yards of singles in a good, strong scarlet, to then ply into 700 yards of 8-12 wpi yarn for the weft thread of a not-really-super-secret-anymore-but-I'm-still-not-advertising project that will be woven on my rigid heddle loom later this year. Since we can get a good 500 yards of singles out of a pound of raw fleece, that's 3 pounds of wool to be dyed. We have to do it in 1-pound batches, which has advantages and disadvantages.

We've done four, yes four, batches of cochineal since last October. Below, from L to R, are batch 2, 3 and 4 drying in my friend's pine trees. I don't have a picture of the first pound, which we did last fall, but for that first attempt we used alum-mordanted wool and a dash of tin added mid-dye to the cochineal bath. Half of that batch had previously been dyed slightly yellow with spinach, the rest not. The spinach portion is a little nicer, but both came out a beautiful scarlet, nicer than even the rightmost (closest) batch here.


Christmas in July? The colours are a little more neon pink here than in-person

As you can see, our dye batches are varying in colour dramatically. We won't be using batch 2, the furthest left, because, ugh. It was our first attempt at tin-mordanted cochineal, which is supposed to give the best scarlets. We tried a version of Lilies cochineal scarlet #1 recipe (Lilies 1990: 131-2), and it was going flame orange. When we added the recommended alum, perhaps not as "carefully" as recommended, the dyebath turned a mucky brown, and the wool a dirty, blue-red.

That experience scared us off the tin a little, so we returned to the alum mordanting for batch three. That's middle batch, above, which came out more raspberry than scarlet. The right batch, dyebath #4, is scarlet (despite this picture showing as bright pink), but lighter than we want, because the dye didn't take to parts of the fleece (perhaps it wasn't scoured enough? Hmmm.).

I pulled a couple sample tufts out of batch 3 and 4 to try a test spin after they dried.


L (batch 3) alum-mordanted cochineal, with 1/2 oz. tin and a dash of tumeric (for yellow) added late in the bath. R (batch 4): Tin and cochineal, one-pot method (Lilies 1990: 132-33), with probably a touch of alum from the previous dyebath still hanging around on the pot and stir-stick

In total, we have a pound of deep raspberry and two pounds of light-mid scarlet that are usable. The plan is to blend together the different dye batches when carding it to get a colour something between both. The two test tufts above give this:


Still not quite the red we're looking for, but this is a 50-50 blend of raspberry and scarlet, and I think we'll be blending it more 33-67% in the end

We'll also need warp thread. I've made the decision, after much deliberation and agonizing, that our handspun DorsetX is simply not going to be suitable to use as warp thread for this project - at least, not the way we'll be spinning it. It will mostly be prepped using cards, not combs (necessary because several people are involved, and handcards are the more common item amongst them), giving a woollen, not worsted yarn. This will make a fuzzy, sticky warp. I also can't confirm that the 2-ply will be strong enough for warp, even on a rigid heddle loom. The test singles definitely weren't.

So in late August, we'll be dyeing another 900 yards of white commercial yarn with cochineal for the warp. It might or might not work: varying colour is one thing when we'll be carding together the different dye batches. But when we dye the skeins, they have to be the colour we want, the first time. Precedent says that we simply don't have that kind of control over the cochineal. So, we'll try it, and if it doesn't work, we'll buy a cone of scarlet warp thread.

In preparation for a weaving frenzy this fall, I've warped up the loom to get some badly needed weaving practice. It seemed a good way to use up the Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece that's been in my stash for years:


The necessities for warping a loom: loom, yarn, coffee, chocolate and yarn tangling wrangling assisstant.

Finally, an indigo vat update. Throughout the unseasonably cool and wet Southern Ontario June, no fermentation has been detected in my vat, although it's still mighty stinky. After consulting with an experienced vat-maker, our guess is that although we had a couple weeks of toasty warm temps in early-mid June, the evening temps around here still go down to 14-17C (in the 50s-60sF), which is causing the vat to cool off too much in the evening and is preventing fermentation. The recommended solution (since I lack a 24/7 firepit):



A double-boiler setup using a fishtank heater. Interesting note: fishtank heaters, even saltwater ones, are not rated for urine, and putting the heater directly into the vat would kill it in short order. Hence the double-boiler. Thank you SharonAnn for that hard-won bit of wisdom, and for being a great indigo vat consultant.

After a couple weeks of this, and several consistent warm and sunny days out of the last seven lacking light rain, thunderstorms and hail, I am starting to smell the unmistakable - and surprisingly pleasant - barnyard-like smell of fermentation under the ever-present stench of stale urine. It's still far from ready, and I'm not entirely convinced that the heater, which has a max temp of 85F (something about not wanting to cook fish?), is warming up the water as much as it needs to be to really encourage things to grow. But it is encouraging. I stir it gently every day or two to get the indigo powder off the bottom of the vat and encourage the chemistry to start. If nothing happens after a week of it staying warm 24/7, then I'll feed it a couple dates.


I still want to believe

I'm not certain how long I can hold on the illusion that I am not really a dyer. I still maintain that this is all about the educational experience, and a single goal. Let's forget about the fact that I'm still contemplating collecting chicory from the roadside, I have weld seeds about to be planted, and that failed attempt to get green from carrot tops a couple months ago... stop laughing. I'm not a dyer. I'm a spinner and weaver who dyes out of necessity. And I am learning quite a lot.

I mean, seriously - did you know that saltwater fishtank heaters weren't rated for urine?

The Power of Dad

Things have been surprisingly busy around here. Mom and Dad visited last weekend. It's always great to see them of course, but even more so when they come here, because Dad comes bearing power tools, years of building fixit experience, and a burning desire to Not Sit Still. In this case, he also brought us the second half of our housewarming gift: a 16-17 ft. telescoping stepladder (the cordless drill was Part One).

A ladder is absolutely essential around here with our high ceilings. Even with a stepstool, DH can barely change a lightbulb without risking serious injury. For me there's no chance. Heaven help us if the smoke alarm had gone off in the last six months. I was considering a nerf crossbow.

Come to think of it, that's probably still not a bad idea. scribbles a note

Dad is the type of guy who has to be kept busy. He loves puttering around drilling and fixing things and generally being extremely helpful. It's his idea of a vacation, if you can believe it. So, to encourage him to visit (we do also enjoy his company, after all) and lest he end up knocking down and putting up walls (it's been known to happen - not here, though... yet), I keep a small list of short-term projects he can play with when he visits.

Within two hours of their arrival, before DH got home from work, Dad had the bathroom fan out of the ceiling, cleaned and back in, purring nicely, a far cry from its previous wake-the-dead-rattle. When DH got home, we unloaded and moved a piano.

The next morning, Dad assembled six drawers for our Ikea wardrobes. We saved those for him (Ikea = DadLego: last time he spent a morning happily assembling our cheap Ikea shelving in the basement). After that, he and DH tackled the air-conditioner, which wasn't running since over the winter something chewed through the wires outside that connected it to the thermostat. It was a 2-person job to run the new wire, so it went onto the DadFunList. I now have air-conditioning again (they both received many hugs and kisses for that, in addition to a fresh round of iced tea).

Then Dad found the loppers and cultivator, and he and DH (bearing the weed-whacker and push-mower) went to town on the jungle growing in our backyard and started plotting the demise of some excess foilage. As the day wound down, he was devising ways of helping me keep up the heat on my indigo vat.

It's OK, he left us a few things to do - the smoke alarms need to be replaced (and now can be, thanks to The Ladder), and we need to get up into the crawlspace and put down some insulation before the fall. Of course, once DH showed him Google Sketch-up, they started excitedly brainstorming ways to tear apart and redo our kitchen. The two of them together are... scary.

I am the luckiest girl ever. I know this. I supply building materials, food, and a constant flow of iced tea, and things happen around me. It's like magic. It's the Power of Dad.

And did I mention I now have my piano?


1978 Baldwin Acrosonic spinet, French provincial style

This is the piano I learned on, ca. 1978. My sister has the piano she learned on (from my grandmother's house). Not to be outdone or without keys, Mom has her "pet rock": a Petrov grand (early on, Dad heard and parsed "Petrov" as "pet rock" and the name stuck). They were so pleased at the notion of recovering some floor space that they loaded the spinet into the trailer and delivered it personally. They've been waiting for me to have a place for it for nearly 15 years. It went into the house much easier than expected, and without serious injury to any person or property.

Now if only I could find all my sheet music. I am missing Chopin, and yet I have two copies of the Bach. It's inexplicable.

In spinning news, I recently scored some lovely new spindles from Butterfly Girl Designs. They are, from L-R, a pair of interchangable carnelian stone whorls on straight shafts, a murano foil whorl on a dark wood shaft, and a black lip mother-of-pearl whorl on an asymetrically carved shaft.



I made a special request for these spindles: shafts without hooks. I've discovered that I prefer using a half-hitch to secure my yarn to the spindle rather than a hook, and BFG was more than happy to help me out. At some point, I would love to get one of her openwork Italian resin spindles, and another multi-whorl set in a nice stone.


The carnelian whorls being used together. Wool is DorsetX, as thin as I can spin it.

I love these paired sets - the whorls are interchangable. Each one can be used separately or together, anywhere on the shaft (high, mid, low), and they would make great supported spindles. No sooner had I bought the carnelian pair than she listed a stunning blue goldstone pair. In the past, she's also had paired sets of rose quartz and hematite. But more spindles will have to wait for a while, I think.

Finally, the first full skein, 135-ish yards, of plied worsted-to-bulky "Berry Berry Nice" yarn: my earliest spinning (the pink tin-mordanted/brazilwood-dyed wool) plied with DorsetX. There's still an equal amount of pink singles left, and I'm spinning more DorsetX to probably make another skein of this.



Whew, that was a lot. I say naps all around are in order:


VAMPIRE CAT SLEEPS DURING DAY

I have pokey sticks. Do you have pokey sticks?

These skewer-like objects were in the far back corner of backyard. I like how they're arranged so... jauntily.

With this last week of actual spring weather, our backyard is at last alive. Let's give a warm welcome to the very first flowers brave enough to open:


I feel like they should get an award or something.

A few days later, the small tulip patch revealed itself to be...


...happily yellow!

The magnolia tree is flowering nicely, and should be in its full glory of pinkness in a couple days:


I don't care if the blooms go away in a week, I love it.

My mother-in-law has identified the two types of bushes along the sides of the yard. There is forsythia down both sides, and what she assures me are lilacs along the left, closest to the house. The forsythia is mostly open and it's pretty, I suppose, but I haven't completely decided if I like it or not.

The lilacs could be a problem. I'm one of those weird people who strongly dislike the smell of lilacs. I think this is because from age 7 to 13, I had to catch the schoolbus at Oh-My-God-O'Clock from the end of my neighbour's driveway in the shadow - and smell - of their untamable lilac bush (which is still there over 25 years later, I kid you not. Even my Dad's backhoe couldn't kill it. The thing is a beast). I personally relocated our bus stop two driveways up the road in my teens because of that thing. Lilacs remind me of early morning ickiness, long bus rides on bumpy roads during which I always became motion-sick, and having to constantly duck flying insects. The smell still makes me mildly queasy and I sneeze a lot.


Lilacs getting ready to bloom, with magnolia in the background. That bright yellow sticking out over there is one of the forsythia bushes.

However, we're leaving everything in place this year so that we can see what all is here before passing judgement. It's all lived here longer than we have, after all. If we decide to dig anything out eventually, I have people who will take them.

There are also still some unknowns. For instance, I'm not certain about the identity of the tree along the right back fence. It needs pruning and is beginning to do battle with the magnolia:


Any ideas?

There is also a small patch of daffodils and a couple other probably-flower things I'm not sure about. I'm about half done with the raking after several hours last weekend. The yard was covered by at least one season's layer of leaves and pine cones, among other things:


Evidence of a neighbourhood cat. I've already seen one, wonder if that's who got this bird?

I've also dug out five lengths of old copper pipe, a piece of siding, quite a bit of plastic and a rawhide dog bone. There are a lot of rocks, including what looks like an attempt at a stone pathway that is partly buried and partly removed. The previous owners' dog also liked to dig holes. There is little to no grass.

But there are pokey sticks. Daniel says if someone breaks into our backyard, we can at least poke them with pointy, rusted pieces of metal. Maybe I'll arrange them around the indigo vat, which I plan to store in the back corner of the yard, as far away from civilization as possible.

Overall, I think this yard thing is going to be fun.

A Time to Spin, Part 9: Random Acts of Plying, and Musings on Pink

In an effort to reduce my expanding collection of singles and make some yarn that might be usable and stronger, I've been doing some plying. I started with the first singles I spun last year, from the first bag of roving I ever bought, plied with some of the DorsetX:


The plying setup, in which the niddy-noddy is demonstrated to be a multi-use tool

What Daniel called the "Strawberry Shortcake yarn," so I now call "Berry Berry Nice":


He named it, he can't un-name it!

I'm enthralled by the stunning pinkness of it all, which is odd, because there is so little pink in my life. Well, not now. I used to like pink. In fact, I was very into pink as a little girl. At age 6, I made my parents paint my bedroom walls pink. I moved out of that room and it became an office while I was in high school, but the pink stayed on a few more years, until after I moved away to university. I have it on good authority that it took several coats of paint to cover the pink.

A stint as the Cheshire Cat in a school play at age ten, combined with a love of all things Cyndi Lauper, meant that my pink phase continued well into my teens. The brighter the better, and when combined with purple, I was a force to be reckoned with.

At some point, it appears that I systematically removed pink from my wardrobe and accessories. When I bought a pink blouse a couple years ago, a friend immediately commented that it was strange to see me in that colour - "not that it looks bad or anything, it looks good! But it's surprising for you, that's all." My husband said something similar.

How did this happen? I can't remember exactly when the anti-pink phase started, but it must have been around high school, when I moved out of my pink room and declared that the title of my autobiography would be My Bridesmaids Will Not Wear Pink.

So sure was I that I designed to keep this declaration intact by avoiding bridemaids altogether. Daniel and I both had a best man, or whatever you would call it when the person who stands for the bride is a guy. We had the word once - the male version of "matron"? Anyhow, my friend Mike, who knew of my declaration, surprised me by wearing pink suspenders in my honour. He's a dear soul, I wish him many fat children.

I guess I've begun to soften my position on pink the last few years. Pink blouse. Pink roving and yarn. Since I've been experimenting with dyeing wool red and discovered how easy it is to get pink with natural dyes (cochineal and brazilwood in particular), pink has, for me, lost some of the "girly" association which has been part of my social conditioning since birth.

I find rebellion against such social conditioning to be an odd and confusing thing: When I recently saw someone describe a colour as "a screaming pink only a little girl and her mother could love," I thought, "Aw, it's not that bad," as if the fact that the mother and daughter would like it made it the wrong shade of pink or something, and if it were a shade of pink that they wouldn't like, that would make it acceptable. Whatever.

I have come to respect the pink. Into everyone's life, a little pink must come. As my parents will tell you (three coats later), pink is persistent. Pink endures.

After all, when red fades, you don't get "light red," right?

Now, if I could only figure out how I'm going to use this yarn. It's so.... pink.

A Time to Spin, Part 3: The not-quite-exponential stash increase

The pink roving is now all spun up, and currently looks like this, on my poor man's bobbins:



The roll in the front with the least amount is what I spun the first day I bought the spindle, included here for comparison. I'm relatively pleased. This was all spun on the carved clay low-whorl spindle.

I'm currently tackling the rest of the Cosmic Pluto roving from the spinning class last month:



On the top whorl is most of the rest of the colourway that produced my first skein. However, this second batch of roving was obviously sitting in a better place in the dyepot, because the colours are far more vibrant. That makes me happy. Since I want it to look mostly like the mini-skein produced in the class, I will spin it all up onto this spindle and make it into 2-ply.

On the carved clay spindle is the second colourway of roving bought at the class. I'm trying a bit harder for consistency now, and purposely breaking and rejoining when it gets too thin. I'm still not very good at joins. I do it five or six times and it still breaks and then I get frustrated, and it ends up being ugly and lumpy. I briefly thought I would ply the pink roving together with this, but looking at them together, I think not. The pinks are different enough that I think the pink roving would dull this down too much, and I really like this, even if it does make me crave gelato.

And since I didn't go to Rhinebeck when it seems like everyone else did, and I do mean everyone, I stopped by Lettuce Knit on Friday (which sent a large contingent) and bought some consolation wool that I've had my eye on for a few weeks (if you love it let it go, if it comes back it's yours... well, it didn't come back, but it was still there, so now it's mine):



Over the last month, while I've continued to try and avoid work, the spinning stash has increased dramatically. Here, for your viewing pleasure, are several pictures of lumps of fibre goodness, many of which look similar in their whiteness, but I can assure you they're not. First is the Almost-White Alpaca, which I might ply with the pink roving or with the gelato yellow/pink roving. Or not.



There's the Brown Shetland, which I might ply with The Fleece. Or not. They are similar, but different, and a plied colour probably needs to either compliment or contrast, but most definitely not clash. I'll decide when I start spinning it and have them both out side-by-side.



The only certain thing is that this white superwash will be plied with the grey superwash, because, well, superwash. You know.



And finally, because I'm crazy and have no idea when I'll even get an appropriate spindle for it let alone feel comfortable enough with my spinning to give it a try, there is Silk Noie...



...and some dyed silk hankies:



My master plan is to ultimately buy at least two more drop spindles, one small and light, the other more average, both nicely finished. The unfinished edges of the whorl on the Ashford Student spindles are somewhat rough on the fibre. Whaddya think? Another, better Ashford? A Bosworth? Mmmm, Bosworth. Maybe two Bosworths, dang, those are nice. I also want good wool combs and carders. I'm thinking Christmas presents. Yep.

I also had a lead on a free, unwashed fleece, but after the initial emails, I haven't heard anything for two weeks. I'm guessing that won't happen - there were three up for grabs to the first responders, and I doubt I was one of them. But since it would be coming through a network of acquaintences, it could just show up with very little warning in a bag with my name on it. Mmmm, free fleece.