Friday, May 25, 2007

Goodbye and haircuts

Dax had to say goodbye to something she didn’t even realize meant so much to her. She has left the little school by the sea that she has attended since Kindergarten. I could tell it was an emotional day for her. At the end of the day she told me she was tired. I replied with, you should try and get to bed earlier today. She then said, it’s not that. I just never have felt so sad and happy at the same time and it has made me feel tired. I thought yeah, I know how you feel. Just wait till you become a mom and realize your baby is growing up way to fast . The school put on a nice little ceremony for the kids. Unfortunately, I totally forgot my camera, and now have no pictures of the event. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that one of Dax’s friend’s parents will take pity on me and share their photos of the day with me. This may take awhile since all of Miss D’s closes friends have left town. One is on a flight as I write this to India for the summer the other left yesterday to Ireland. Poor thing she is just stuck her with us. I did make plans for the traditional camping trip to Ft. Wilderness at Disney. As per tradition, Rudy of course will not be attending this event with us because he doesn’t really care much for the Disney World thing. He is planning on getting some inspections on the house while we are gone. Anyway, I am looking forward to the trip. I’m hoping to catch the last few days of the flower festival at Epcot and also the star wars weekend at MGM while there.

I wanted to show a progress photo of Miss D’s tank she is knitting but she has ripped it out. She completed the back and started on the front. After knitting about 4 inches on the front she noticed her gauge totally changed. It was much tighter. I kept asking her if she is sure she’s using the same size needles and she said yes. She kept working on it but finally decided she didn’t like it so started the front over on bigger needles. I think she was feeling stress and that is why she was knitting so much tighter. Let’s hope she keeps her stressed knitting style since she went to bigger needles.

I do have some pictures of Tyde and his hair cut. Here he is after the hair cut. I know his hair is still a bit long. Can you see the curls? This picture does not show them off very well. It was windy when I took it and I kept moving his hair out of his face. He usually has it going right across his eyes. He has never had any signs of curls in his hair before. I’m a bit awed by the curls. I wonder how long they will stay around.

Oh here he is before the haircut. Yeah, it was long. This picture is from one of Bob’s while they were visiting.

As for me I have some socks on the needles. The pattern is called Latvian Socks from Nancy Bush’s Folk sock book. I have a feeling these will be on the needles for awhile because I keep getting side tracked by other projects.


I hope everybody has a great weekend.

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Fleece

I haven’t been doing much knitting lately. Instead I’ve been washing fleece. While at the MSWF, I bought more then one fleece. I was so excited about it. The only step closer I could have gotten to wool would have been owning a sheep, which will never happen since I live in Florida. So, I packed my bags up, went to the airport and headed home. One of the bags had nothing in it but the fleece I bought. I was wondering if it was going to get inspected and what the inspectors would have thought about a bag full of wool that had just came off the sheep. Fortunately, it didn’t happen. Which I have to mention here, that this was the first time I’ve flown out of the Baltimore airport and did not have my checked in bags inspected. The last time they inspected my bag is when I got my spinning wheel. They didn’t pack it back in as gently as I did and they broke it. I was so upset but was able to fix it and recovered quickly once I started to use it. Anyway I got home after midnight, the flights were delayed because of bad weather in Orlando. Even though it was late I had to pull out my fleece to make sure it was still there.

Rohan loves this stuff. I mean he loves it! I couldn’t keep his head out of the bag.

Rohan has a bad history with wool. When he was a puppy he ate the heel out of the first pair of socks I ever made. I was devastated. Not only was it the first sock I ever made but the first project I ever completed. Of course, first I yelled at him then I wouldn’t play with him. I think he knows better now, but I don’t trust him. He now has this routine he does. He will usually put his nose as much in the middle of the fiber as possible and start breathing deeply. If I let him continue he will gently start putting the wool in his mouth. If it’s a ball of yarn he will bring it to me. It is almost as if he is asking me if he can have it. This is where I take it away from him. I usually put any animal fibers up out of his reach when I’m not around to watch him. I don’t want the sock issue to come up again.

Back to the fleece, as soon as I could I decided to start washing this stuff. I have never done this before or seen anybody else do it. So, I did what anybody else would do in this situation, I looked on the internet for information on how to clean it. I found this page. Looks simple enough right? So, I layed the fleece out and took some of the ickiest stuff off first. This was around the bottom. I figured since I didn’t know what I was doing and had a pretty good chance of screwing this up that I would start with the dirtiest stuff first. I think I must have gotten fleece off of the dirtiest sheep out there. It must have lived near a mud puddle. It took me 15 rinsings before the water was clear. At this point I’m starting to think, what have I gotten myself into. I have a lot more fleece to wash then just this first batch. I must have been intoxicated beyond reason by the smell of wool while at the MSWF, to have bought all this fleece. So, I went to the spin-list for help and noticed a post from somebody else that must have done the same thing as me. One of the comments to her was to wash it in smaller batches. Ok, that sounds good. Whew, much better. The water starts to run clear after the third rinse. However, as I sit here writing this I still have at least four more batches of the first fleece to wash and another whole fleece to do. While in the middle of all this washing I decided to go ahead and try and brush some of this out to see what it looks like. After doing this for about an hour I’ve decided I need a drum carder. This hand carding stuff is to slow for me. So, I am now on the search for a drum carder.

Here is some of the fleece so far. To the right is the unwashed fleece, middle washed and to the left the combed out fleece. There is 10 pounds of it from a corriedale/lincoln sheep.


I did mention I have not been knitting very much but Dax has. Here is her current project. She is working on a tank top/ camisole pattern from Tess. The ribbon yarn is also from Tess.

Colorful isn't it? I keep wondering if Dax is going to go through a black stage, you know when she will not wear anything but black. She definetly isn't in that stage, yet. Tess' Designer yarns are lovely. Dax was not the only one in our group that spent money here.

I also wanted to comment real quick to Jennifer, who asked how I back up my pictures. I have a dvd/cd burner and use the software called Nero to burn my pictures to a cd.

I hope everybody is having a good week. We have two more days of school left here. One if you don't count today, Yippeeee.

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival

I had such a good time at the Maryland sheep and wool festival. It’s just an awesome almost overwhelming sight to see all the fiber. I have to say the most enjoyable part is to be around other people that have the same appreciation for the art that comes from wool. It has been hard for me to pick what pictures to put on the blog from the festival but here they are.

This guy was in the parade of sheep. In this picture he is waiting to be sheared.

Alpacas!

and Bunnies.

Lunch.

Made some felt flowers. The pink one is Sierra's the green one Cyndi's and the purple one is mine. Dax wanted to watch the auction instead of participating in the class.


Me at the campsite trying to detangle Dax's ribbon yarn.

More sheep

Getting ready to go back to the van.

Some things I wanted to say about the festival.
The kids got a lot of nice comments on there hats. Dax and Sierra made there hats and Solomon was wearing a hat that was felted on a ball.

There was a big line at The Fold, who sells the “socks that rocks” yarn. I think I must be one of the few sock knitters that hasn’t bought any of the STR yarn and it looked like it was going to stay that way because I didn’t want to stand in line. However I did notice later in the day the line was not so long so managed to walk over that way. I was thinking the whole time they must be out of the sock yarn by now. Surprise there was still some left and yep, I got some. I am now officially a member of the STR owners club. My sister is to.

I watched the parade of sheep for the first time. It was great to see the different kinds of sheep.

I spent more money then what I probably should have but justified it by telling myself that 1. no store in my area sells this kind of stuff and 2. It’s nice to support the vendors.

It also seemed a lot less crowded to me then in the past. Nice for me but the vendors probably thought differently.

I wish I had more time to meet the other spinners, weavers, knitters.

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Finished

I did finish the cable and lace sweater in time, yeah! Unfortunately I had to stay up late and neglect some other tasks to get it done. I still feel a bit tired from trying to do everything I wanted to do. Here’s the finished sweater.

Not a great picture, the camera is doing funky things to the knit stitch but you get the idea.
I wore it on Saturday at the MSWF.
Pattern: Cable Eyelet Panel Short Sleeve Pullover
Yarn: Knit picks main line, dusty lavender
Needles: Size 4, the pattern called for size 8. I had to do some adjusting because of this.

It is still crazy busy here right now but I should have time soon to catch up on the blogs I like to read and to post some pictures from the MSWF.