He Who has Mad Computer Skillz

I may be the poet in the family, but The Chief is the brains of the operation. My computer has been driving me INFRICKINGSANE for about two months. There was some crappy device driver error crashing windows, until finally, the little POS dumped altogether. Now being me, I had all these ideas of what was wrong.

The Chief somehow (like magic man, I'm not kiddin) persuaded my recovery disks to work. (he said words like reformat, disk, drive, stuff like that). He did some diddly magicky stuff to my hard drive and VOILA.

Sucker works now.

Gaze upon his braininess (pretend he's not eating)


I think hé's the smartest and wonderfulest in the world.
I'm spinning 8 ounces of gray polypay. It's kind of weird. The staple is really short, but its so crimpy that it just grabs more fiber without a problem. I'm gonna navaho ply it, so I'm spinning a very thin single. I'm almost done with the first bobbin. Let me summarize: I am staring at thin gray yarn for like a long long time.


To reward myself when it's done, I've picked out something really fun to spin. It's Suffolk.


It's making me spend more time on the gray than i would if I didn't have something really fun to spin after. I know what you're thinking, and yes, Tony Robbins could take a lesson from me in motivation. I know what motivates the psychotic spinner mind like nobody else, baby.

I'm no Shakespeare

Oh wool, how I do love thee
You come in pretty colors, or even better, natural shades that can be spun as is or overdyed

Black as night

lovely light tan

and all shades of gray

You warm up my feet, as well as my day
I love you so much, I cheered when I bought
twenty five pounds of you, for hey, not a lot.

Glittens are almost done
They are from hand dyed Shetland. I dyed them with number 4 and the glittens are for her. The photos are a little washed out, but the colors are gorgeous. purple, green and aqua. There should be enough left for me to have some gloves too.



Don't be jealous of my mad poetry skillz. Poetry is the new rap, ya know.

March socks for a March

My mom's maiden name is March, so it's only fitting that she get the March socks from the Sock a Month KAL I'm participating in. These are knit using the toe-up sock recipe from Fleegle's blog. They are knit from fam-dyed, Shetland roving. It's my first sock yarn, but the second pair from this batch. I think I still have enough left for fingerless gloves, so that's gonna happen soon.

We also dyed some roving this weekend. We experimented with Kool-Aid this time. I don't think it'll be my first choice, but it's fun to do with the family and it was super cheap. I paid $.60/doz packets at Aldi. Here are the results.


We used grape, lemon/lime and berry (blue) for this one. It reminds me of hyacinths and lilacs because it has all different shades of pink/purple/green. We used some salt in the water to stabilize the purple and it really helped.

On this one we used some yellow food coloring to get the yellow because we didn't have lemon kool-aid. ut we also used more lemon/lime and more of the berry for the blue. It's very pretty and I can't wait to spin it. It's BFL again and that stuff just spins beautifully.

I know I promised some photos of the stash enhancement, soon!

Prepare to crap

Ok, so I mentioned that I was going to spin up that BFL. Before I did, I divided it in half the long way. Here's my rationale: I figure, divide in half the long way, spin up two plies, starting with opposite ends, then ply together. That way, you should have something that repeats in corresponding stripes starting at each end and going towards the middle.

One little problem: when you are spinning 300-400 yds of singles, you are bound to have some variation that will cause it to not match up when you get to the other end. Like maybe one will be 10 or more yards longer, that's not a big variation in the scheme of 300+ yds right? That would throw off my striping scheme completely, but I figured I'd give it a shot.

No shit, people, this is the true, if I'm lyin, I'm dyin end of the two singles when plied together.



That is a difference of less than three fricking inches. Over the course of 300+ yards, that is just a miracle. It'll never happen again, but I sure am enjoying it since it happened this time.

Here's a pic of the finished skein, and one of the spinning as it began. This stuff was really beautiful to spin.



I scored today bigtime too. I bought 25 pounds of Shetland roving off a lady in a nearby town for $100. I'll post some photos of the stash enhancement later.

yay me!

What day is it anyway?

Yesterday I woke up with really burny eyes and a stuffy head. I believe its just allergies from a thaw (yes MFers! I said a THAW! Brief, but anyway thank God). I did finish spinning the silk tussah roving that I dyed a month or so ago. I'm glad its done.

I promised a photo of the mittens I designed to match the Unoriginal Hat that I made for myself. I love them. Gee it's too darn bad that the weather is not going to provide us with any mitten weather until next winter (said very loudly to give the universe an idea of what I want)



Want to see what I'm spinning next? It's hand dyed (by me) Blue Faced Leicester. The holy grail of wool spinning (at least in my eyes). I really don't want to mess it up. It's only four ounces so the plan is socks. It's not exactly what I had intended to get with the dyeing, but it still turned out absolutely beautiful. The blues and greens are right, but the red, no so much. Oh well. I have discovered that it doesn't pay to be afraid because even the mistakes are absolutely stunning.


I think I'm going to do a bit more dyeing this weekend. come back and see!

Lazy Tuesday

I woke up feeling a little under the weather this morning so here's my lazy blog post.

Your Score: Harry Potter

Don't fight it...it is who you are!

You are old scar-head himself! Congratulations! You aim to solve the world's problems and avenge your parents deaths. Good for you.

Link: The Mega Harry Potter Character Test written by lucky_dip on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test View My Profile(lucky_dip)

Home again

Well we made our trip. We were actually in Lancaster, OH for most of it, although it was a bit of a whirlwind. I brought you the highlights:

We saw art:

You may have to click on that to blow it up and see the true . . uhhhhh. . . artistry.

There was fine dining:

We saw the local sights:

There was family belonging to the Chief:

There was cake and marriage (which was very sweet):


There was tequila (not pictured) which I uncharacteristically did numerous shots of while goading others (also uncharacteristically) to do shots as well. Mercifully, there was no upchucking.

But most importantly, there was Smidge:

Smidge,

and more Smidge:

There was knitting too. I'll show ya tomorrow.