I am so excited about this!! I think it’s brilliant, and if I saw this flyer, I would totally sign up. But since no one else is doing it, I decided I’ll just have to do it myself. Click for a bigger image, where you can actually read all the text. Feel free to repost anywhere you like. And here’s a higher-resolution version to print out and hang up anywhere.
I’m so excited!
Last weekend, Hobostripper stayed with me. I’m not sure what else needs to be said about that. How often does one get a Hobostripper and her well-trained dog hanging out for a few days? I don’t know about you all, but this doesn’t happen to me all that often. We played in the woods, went to visit Rusty Cock Ridge, talked a lot. She wants to start some sort of wilderness education program herself, so we talked a lot about the things I’ve learned in the last few years. She made a fabulous beef curry stew that we ate for every meal for about three days straight. After that was gone, we resorted to eating amazing salads mostly from the garden in the backyard (just add cheese and hearts of palm…mmmmm).
The day she left, Preston got back from driving across the country. According to Mapquest, it should take 45 hours to drive from South Carolina to here, with no stops. Preston did it in 70 hours, including a 12-hour stop in Boise to hook up with some old friends, in addition to all the gas stops, construction slowdowns, and the occasional rest area nap. We have a conception in our culture that if you love someone, you should love them without reference to their actions. I’ve heard this called unconditional love, though it’s rarely actually without condition. Anyway, I love Preston for lots of reasons, and I would still probably love him if he didn’t have mad driving skillz, but it’s definitely one of the reasons I Like him a lot. And it’s not just about the driving, but about the capacity to take care of oneself (and beyond that, to act graciously and gracefully) in unfamiliar and uncomfortable situations. He’s pretty cool and I’m glad he lives with me.
And then, two days after that, several pounds of alpaca fiber showed up in my mailbox!
Altogether, that’s 4 pounds of alpaca fiber. You can’t really appreciate the color of the grey/silver in the background, but it’s quite lush. My mom totally hooked me up. There was an ad in her local newspaper from a local alpaca ranch. They were looking for folks to spin up their fleeces. They will send me all the fiber I want, I’ll spin it all up and send them back half. I can do whatever I want with my half, including sell it. Wow! I was thinking that if I could spin a pound of it in 6 hours, then I could make somewhere around minimum wage for selling my half of the spun yarn. I tried it out last night. Haha! I spun less than an ounce in 1 hour. (For those of you who don’t live with an engineer who knows these conversions off the top of his head, there are 16 ounces in a pound.) So maybe I’ll have to go back to looking at it as just a great way to get fiber for personal use. But the alpaca is really nice to work with, so soft and really seems to want to spin thin. My first spindle is coming out to be a two-ply light sportweight, about 15-16 wraps per inch. This is definitely thinner than I usually spin without some effort. Here’s a close-up of the four colors, although you still don’t get a good sense of the grey fibers.
So far I’ve just been spinning the white fibers. They are really clean and un-matted. I haven’t had to wash it or card it, just pick out the occasional bit of hay as I spin, so I’m basically spinning right from the animal. He also sent me a half pound of suri alpaca to play with. I haven’t ever worked with it before (see my previous post about alpacapalooza for pictures of the two different kinds of alpaca). Their hair is longer and straighter and seems to matte more, so I will have to wash that stuff. I’m also going to try washing some of the regular huacaya fibers, even though they don’t seem to need it, just to see what difference it makes.
And just to top it all off, Preston’s economic stimulus check showed up this week, so we are feeling even a little richer than usual. He’ll be putting his into surfboard shaping supplies (…”maybe a router,” he’s been musing…). I’m waiting impatiently for mine, with which I plan to buy a digital SLR, probably the Canon Digital Rebel XTi. And speaking of cameras, I’m motivated again to put some more effort into making something happen with selling photos. I feel like my current job has given me a lot of tools for online marketing and sales that I didn’t have the first time around. So I’ll be working on updating the main Whoa! Photos website and posting a new series of pictures that I’ve taken of a beautiful pin-up girl type. Lots of beautiful nature shots for all you pagans out there 
I realized that as far as y’all know, I haven’t knit anything since, um, wow, last October! But I have indeed been knitting since then. For those of you who don’t really care so much about the knitting, I recommend just skimming down to the bottom where there are cute cat pictures. Most of this post will be boring if you are the sort of person who has never been so in love with a ball of yarn that you wanted to eat it. If you are curious about any of the pictures, they can all be clicked on for larger images.
First off, my sister brought some yarn with her all the way back from her trip to Italy, and it as the most scrumptiously soft yarn you have ever felt. It’s by Filatura di Crosi, and I’m afraid it’s discontinued. It definitely needed to be a scarf, so that is what it is.
I really like how it turned out to go around my neck really narrow, almost like a choker and then have a bunch of drapey folds in the front, but it turned out like that totally by accident. When I started it, I started it way too wide, and realized I was going to have a very small baby blanket rather than a scarf. A very wise woman at my knitting group suggested that, instead of having to frog the whole thing and start over, that I just decrease a bunch. I had only two skeins of the yarn, and it’s discontinued, so I decreased a bunch and went until my first skein was gone. I decreed that to be the halfway point, and used the second skein to increase back up. It created a pretty funny-looking flared end on both sides of the scarf which look really funny laid flat, but I like the way it looks on.
From there, I decided to tackle a felted slipper pattern that Jane had given me almost a year ago. I had enough handspun wool from Lupine, Kathy’s sheep, to make 10 slippers (or so I thought). I finished one of them (highlighted over on The Dailey’s Weekly back in March), but was almost out of wool and had to wait for an emergency shipment of more wool from Kathy before I could spin enough to make the second slipper. (Turns out it takes a LOT of yarn to make a felted slipper. When I made the first one, I just couldn’t believe that the instructions were right. The finished slipper, before felting, was big enough for three or four feet.) But anyway, I finished them both up finally, and Preston seems to like them. They look like Bigfoot Feet to me, and if I ever make another pair, I will try to felt claws on the front 
It felt (haha!) really good to have completed a whole project using all yarn I had handspun myself, so I decided to tackle a project where I had to actually spin the yarn to a particular dimension with a particular project in mind. All the spinning I’d done before was just learning how it all worked and spinning the fiber to whatever dimension it seemed easiest to do. This time I decided that I wanted to make a beautiful and elegant scarf for a friend of ours. I knew she wanted something in red, and I wanted to be able to do a lacy pattern, so I looked around online and in some books and found a classic lace pattern called “Crest of the Wave” in a book I got from the library. (Sorry I don’t remember the book.) I spun up two slightly different shades of red, about an ounce each, and spun them as thin as I could. Then I plied the two shades together, and at a two-ply, it came out to be heavier than lace-weight yarn, but definitely lighter than worsted-weight. The red shading was very subtle but added some dimension to the color. I used #9 needles to knit up a scarf for my friend. She loved it. I think I could have blocked it more severely to open up the lace a little more.
Somewhere along the path, I think while I was working on the slippers, I discovered that I can knit and read at the same time! According to Elizabeth Zimmerman (who I am totally in love with and want to marry…her motto was “Knit on with confidence and hope, through all crises.”), anyone who can read aloud can also knit and read at the same time, since both involve reading a few words, or sometimes a few sentences, ahead of the words that you’re actually understanding, sort of like the function on CD players that keeps them from skipping. I’m not yet good enough to do it on patterns, but I can work just a basic knit in the round while reading. And just in the knick of time, I came across the pattern for a Kitty Pi. (Based on a design by Elizabeth Zimmerman, called the Pi Shawl, and based on the concept that as a circle’s radius doubles, it’s circumference does as well.)
So I spun up a bunch more of Lupine’s wool (same stuff as Preston’s slippers) and made up a kitty pi for Pavarotti. Magoo already has a little Magic Carpet, the one and only weaving project I ever finished (and by “finished” I mean I got it 2/3 done, and then took it off the loom and tied off the extra warp ends and called them “fringe”). So I thought Pavi should have his very own place to nap. The kitty pi is designed without a top crust, but I thought Pavi’s should wrap over the top a little, since he is a burrowing animal. This was another felted project, so I made it huge and felted it down. I learned an important lesson about felting different wools. The Lupine wool was washed either by Kathy herself or by the small mill she sent it to be turned into roving. The creamy white merino that I used for half the top of the pi was processed by some large commercial facility. I think the Lupine wool still has a fair amount of oil in it, and it takes a lot longer to felt than the commercially processed white stuff. So I ended up with a lot less creamy white topping than I intended, since it felted a lot faster than the main body. Even though Magoo already has the Magic Carpet, she immediately knew that this was a fancy upgrade and moved right in.
Pavi also likes it, but he thinks it is better suited as a place to hide toys and then pounce on them when they are least expecting it.
Preston also loves the kitty pi and he wants to know how long it would take me to knit up a 6 foot one. I think this might take more wool than Lupine has to offer, so Preston made due with pretending that it was a kangaroo pouch and taking Little Roo (aka Pavi) on the hippity-hop tour of the whole house.
Pavi thinks bad attention is better than no attention, so he didn’t mind the tour.
And finally, we come to the most recent project, which is a Knitting Mystery. Preston couldn’t have a 6 Foot Preston Pi, but I agreed to make him a hat instead. He picked out colors from the yarns I had, and I used the same pattern I had used last year to make my favorite hat. I guess I must have finished it sometime during my blogging hiatus, because there’s no picture up, so you will have to trust me that this is a very fine hat. So I embarked upon the second one, using the blue and yellow yarn Preston had picked out. I followed the directions just as I did the first time. When the hat was done, and I cast off the circular needles, it seemed unnecessarily big. Rather then re-knit it, Preston suggested the we just felt it down a little, since it was all wool. Brilliant! So we dropped it in the washer, where the most peculiar thing happened. It turned into a kitty pi!
I often say that I don’t know what happened when I just don’t want to admit to a stupid mistake, but in this case, I really don’t know what happened. I made exactly the same pattern 6 months ago, and it turned into a hat. Very peculiar. I re-checked the pattern, but there weren’t any decreases that I missed or anything. I’ll take it with me to my knitting group on Monday and see if any of them can explain it to me.
This is a quick (14 second) video I took with my camera just so you could hear the sound an alpaca makes. People in the know call it humming, but I think they kinda sound like squeeky toys.
Yes, that’s right. I said Alapacapalooza: Three Days of Peace, Love, and Livestock. It was at a nearby fairgrounds a couple weeks ago, and I keep forgetting to post pictures. If you have never seen a real live alpaca, you are definitely missing out. They are the most adorable little things you have ever seen.
See what I mean! It’s like a furry little ewok and you just want to pinch their furry little cheeks! I didn’t try it but, I suspect that alpacas do not like to have their cheeks pinched. In fact, I suspect that they take themselves fairly seriously.
You might notice that the fiber on the alpacas in those two pictures seems different. It turns out that there are two very different kinds of alpacas–the Suri and the Huacaya. The Suri have much longer, straighter hair. I understand that their hair is more like silk, very fine and smooth and not much crimp to it. But I haven’t had a chance to feel any of the unfinished Suri fibers. I think they look kinda dorky, you know, in an adorable sort of way.
The Huacaya are the more ewok-looking ones like the first picture. Their hair is curly, but not kinky like a sheep’s, and they don’t have lanolin so it’s super soft right off the animal. It feels like holding warm clouds. Really.
Of course, they all look funny right after they get sheared.
And it turns out that they think each other looks funny after they get sheared too. I had heard this about sheep, but witnessed it with the alpacas also. It turns out that they have a pretty incredible visual memory. According to the shearer, they will remember a person’s face for about 2 years, so alpacas that she sheared last year will know who she is right away. They also recognize other alpacas visually, and they keep track of each other by sight. So when one of them gets taken out of the pen and sheared and then brought back, no one recognizes her at first. There is lots of squeeling and sniffing while the rest of the herd compiles enough secondary clues to be able to confirm her identity without all the hair.
And also, one mustn’t forget the third kind of alpaca–the punk-rock alpaca.
p.s. Someone in my knitting group gifted me a *whole alpaca fleece*! Pictures to come after I get it processed and ready for spinning. It’s a beautiful grey color from an alpaca named Rex.
I bought myself a banjo for xmas! That’s right, and I’m even practicing and everything. This morning I stopped at the music store on my way to work and got a set of those nifty banjo picks that slide over your fingers like big ol goth fingernails. I can’t strictly say that I know how to play any songs yet, but I’m working on Wildwood Flower, which is one of my favorites. And I’m learning chords and finger-picking rolls. Oddly enough, I just learned from my mom that she spent most of the time that she was pregnant with me learning how to play the banjo! And then when I was born, she gave the banjo away so I never had any idea that she played it.
I also got my number one most wanted thing for xmas, a spinning wheel!Oddly, I don’t have a good picture of it, but it’s an Ashford Traveller and you can see a picture of one here. It took a few weeks to get it here from Boise. It’s too big for a carry-on and too fragile for checked luggage. I thought we would have to drive all the way back to Boise in the snow to get it, but then Craigslist came to the rescue. Someone was advertising a rideshare from Boise to Portland, I offered to pay some gas money if they would bring over my wheel. It worked great, we met them in Portland, and I got my wheel! (And also some other stuff that I’m sure Preston thought was very important, but whatever cuz this isn’t his blog). So I’ve been spinning and spinning for the last couple weeks.
That’s Pavi down there in the left corner. He likes to help with the spinning very much. I made a trip up to Weaving Works in Seattle to buy some more roving (after I spun all of the dark brown roving that Kathy had supplied me with, and that I thought was a lifetime supply, in a few days). I’ve learned that I can spin and ply about 2 ounces of prepared merino roving in about 3 hours. At around $2 per ounce for the roving, that’s not a bad price for a few hours entertainment. But since I want to do it ALL THE TIME, it’s starting to cost more than I really want to spend regularly. One solution has been to buy white roving instead of the color dyes. I’ll either dye it myself (which I’m a little overwhelmed by) or just use it white. I’m spinning up some of the white stuff now, doing it as fine as I can, and I think it’s very beautiful. (click for bigger)
I’m also planning to go to the Madrona Fiber Arts Festival in a week and a half. I’m interested in buying a whole fleece and just getting it processed into roving (rather than trying to hand card the whole thing). I found this little processing facility called Big Sky Quality Wool whose prices don’t seem too bad. Also, I know Kathy sent of her fleeces somewhere to be processed, so I’ll get some info from her about the pricing and if she was happy with the quality of their work. Anyway, it’s possible to buy a fleece online for a fairly good price, but I don’t know enough about the different kinds of wool to know which kind to get. I know I don’t need a Merino fleece (super-nice, but expensive) but I don’t know what other kinds are soft and good to work with. So I’m planning to go to the Fiber Arts Festival and take a notebook and start educating myself about different kinds of wool in a place where I can actually touchy-feely a lot of different breeds. And while I’m sending stuff off to be processed anyway, someone in my knitting group offered to give me a whole alpaca fleece! She said someone gave it to her more than a year ago and she just doesn’t think she’s going to get around to doing anything with it. Alpaca roving is a lot more than $2 per ounce, so it would be a raging deal to get a free fleece and send it off for processing. I can’t wait!
Bonus picture for the fiber folks out there (click for bigger):
Hard to lose with that equation, isn’t it? This blogger I read also is a fabulous spinner, and she supports her family with her amazing hand-dyed and hand-spun yarns. As you might imagine, her x-mas budget is tight, so she’s offering a fabulous deal. She has a short wishlist on her blog for things she’d like to be able to give her kids for the holiday, and she’s willing to trade her handspun yarn if you can help her out.
Her blog is at http://www.insubordiknit.com
And, you know, I’m just saying, maybe you want to do something good but you don’t knit…well, I don’t know if you knew this, but I knit a little something every now and then. And I am maybe so in love with her yarn that I would like to marry it.
So I returned from my long weekend of tracking at the Oregon Dunes (which was Awesome! stories and pictures to follow soon) to learn that I am unexpectedly unemployed.
*rant* Why is it that employees are expected to give at least 2 weeks notice, while employers think it is totally acceptable to give no notice at all? I would never think of just not showing up and leaving an employer to scramble to cover my position. Why do they think it’s okay to leave me scrambling to figure out how to pay my house payment? */rant*
So, what have I done with the last few days of unexpected free time? If I was a Very Responsible Person I would have spent that time working hard to secure meaningful employment. Those of you who know me, you know where this is going.
That’s right. I started a new knitting project. This is a top-down hat (pattern here), because I’m not sure how much yarn I have left, so I want to be able to adjust the height of the hat to accomodate that. This is the first batch of yarn that I spun myself that I’m using to knit something. It’s just a cool as I hoped it would be, and I love the feel of it. It was one of the very first things that I tried on Kathy’s spinning wheel, so it’s definitely thick/thin and has varying amounts of twist in it, but I think it’s great. I’m going to modify the pattern to incorporate a spiral pattern to match these wristwarmers that I finished on the tracking trip.
The picture doesn’t really capture the spiral pattern, and even in person it’s fairly subtle. It’s just a series of k3 p1 and the purl bump ends up off by one in each subsequent row. There’s no pattern for the gloves because I made it up. I cast on 25 stitches, decided I needed to decrease a little for the wrist, then increased again for the heel of my hand. I knit it in the round using 4 double-pointed #8 needles and for the thumbhole I just turned the work instead of going all the way around for about 8 rows or so.
If you have a ravelry account, you can see more about my Works In Progress and even see all the stuff in my yarn stash under the username deandail. If you do not have a ravelry account, you better sign up for one right away or everyone will know that you are not one of the cool kids. If you do not knit, and don’t understand why you would want a ravelry account, well then, you are definitely not one of the cool kids.
And also, while I’ve been working on knitting, and taking pictures of my stash, and browsing everyone else’s stash and blogs, I felt like I wasn’t really immersed enough in the knitting, so I have found a whole category of knitting podcasts on iTunes! For free! So far, my favorite is “Cast On” by Brenda Dayne. It’s so good, it’s even in the Philosophy category! So now I can knit and listen to other people talk about knitting AT THE SAME TIME!
But then I was feeling sort of guilty for not really Accomplishing Something Productive, and I thought “hey, making curtains is productive right? I mean they help insulate our single-pane windows and save us money, right? This would be a Productive Thing, right? Right?”
So I finished Preston’s curtains. He’s going with a tropical theme in his room. He’s planning to hang a retired surfboard and that Hawaiian shirt (on the left of the window) on one wall, and incorporate various other tropical sort of elements into his room. I saw this fabric at Goodwill for $2 and thought that it might be a little too childish, but we both love them now that they are up. When the light shines through them from the outside, the whole room turns blue and you feel like you are sitting at the bottom of the tropical lagoon. Except that you can breath.
I had also finished the curtains for my room a week or two ago and forgot to post the picture (which is crappy, but you get the idea).
Also, lest some of you worry (hi Mom!) I am also looking for a job. Basically, the last job boiled down to a major misunderstanding where when I said, “I would like to be a wilderness mentor and I’ve never worked with anyone disabled before” they heard me say, “I would like to be a companion for your developmentally disabled daughter and would like nothing better than to sit around and watch movies with her”. I never gave them my Nanny’s Manifesto because shortly after I wrote it, it became clear that it wasn’t relevant to them. They were not looking for a nanny, they were looking to buy a friend for their daughter, a role I might have been willing to play had they let me know that’s what they wanted. So whatever. Let me know if you know of any ways to make money while sitting around listening to knitting podcasts and designing curtains.
Quite a while ago (6 months ago?), Kathy came to visit, and she bought us both some sock yarn and patterns for making toe-up socks. I had previously only made a couple hats. I tell you about my relative inexperience in order to justify the sad state of the socks to come. The first sock actually came along pretty well. I followed the instructions in Janet Rehfeldt’s “Toe-Up Techniques for Hand Knit Socks”. The book is brilliant and it helped me to understand how the sock gets shaped to a foot as you go. The fact that things did not turn out as planned has nothing to do with her instructions and everything to do with my inattention to them.
The first sock actually didn’t go too badly.
A little loose around the toe and heel, but definitely wearable as a house sock. But alas, and I’m not sure what happened, then there came the floppy sock of shame.
And by “I don’t know what happened”, I mean that I know exactly what happened but it’s too embarrassing to admit that I made such a dumb mistake and then chose not to frog it way down by the toe when I had the chance. Nope, I stayed in knitterly denial right up to the cuff, even managing to convince myself that there was no point in trying it on because it was going to be just the same as the first one, right? Mmm-hm. Right.
I’ve even washed it in super-hot water and dried it in the dryer, hoping that even though it’s superwash wool, it would shrink a little bit. Alas. So probably I will rip it out all the way to the first row after the cast-on (cuz that’s where the mistake started) and re-do the whole thing.
But first I’m taking a break from that project to make some wrist warmers. I’m using some of the wool that I spun myself on Kathy’s spinning wheel while I was in McCall this summer. It’s thick wool and #8 needles, so it’s going quickly. No pictures here because it will be the first post on a new blog project that I hope to have started in the next couple weeks. And by “couple weeks” I mean in something less than a year.
