Long Time Gone

The longer I go without blogging, the harder it seems to be to come back to it, primarily because I feel like I should tell you everything that's happened of any significance since the last time I posted.  But that's just not realistic, so here I am back again, and I'll hit a few highlights and we'll just pretend it hasn't been that long OK?

My son and his family are back North Carolina, at least for the next couple of years until the Army decides to send him somewhere else, so we've been able to spend more time with him, his wife and the grandkids.  I love my kids, I love my grandkids, but spending a few hours with the grands makes me glad I'm done with the kid-raising phase of my life.  The joy of being a grandparent is being able to enjoy some time with them then send them back home with Mom & Dad!

We took a trip to Louisiana in March to celebrate the 90th birthday of Rob's Aunt Sue.  It was good to see some of his family that we rarely see and my DIL was able to bring the grandkids down too even though my son couldn't get leave.  Sue is my MIL's sister and is quite a bit older than her, but you can see the family resemblance.

Rob & I celebrated our 16th anniversary last week, and I can't believe he's put up with me this long.  There are days it seems like our wedding was yesterday, and others when it feels like it's been forever.  But that's true of most marriages I suppose, but I'm glad he's stuck with me for yet another year.

I took a sewing class for a few weeks and have actually learned how to use my sewing machine, although it will be a long time for I feel like I have any degree of expertise. I've also attended a couple of fiber events this spring, but I'll talk more about those in separate posts.

Other than that, it's my busy time of year at work, so my hours are erratic.  Some days I work relatively normal hours and other days I work until late at night just to get things done that need to be done for the next day.  I've been in my current job over 20 years now, and although some days I would like to find something different, for the most part I still like my job, and every time I try to imagine doing something else I think of all the things I would miss about my current job.  I keep my eyes open for something else that might be interesting, but I've essentially resigned myself to being here another 9 years and 8 months at which point I can retire with full benefits, and hope to do so!

O.k. quick and dirty update done, more crafting and other tidbits to come, assuming I don't get totally distracted again right?

SAFF 2015

One of my favorite trips of the year is the annual Southeastern Animal Fiber Fair (SAFF) held just outside Asheville, NC.  This year, because the dates of the event were moved to the last weekend in October, there was no tractor show, so we were able to use the entire grounds of the Western North Carolina Agriculture Center.

This year I took two classes.  On Thursday I took an all day spinning class with Judith MacKenzie.  I still consider myself very much a novice spinner, so I really learned a lot in this class.  Unfortunately, as is usual when I get immersed in what I'm doing, I didn't think to take a single picture of Judith or anything we did in this class.

Friday morning I took a class with my secret boyfriend Franklin Habit. This class was on doing steeks (aka cutting your knitting on purpose) and installing zippers into knitting.  I had never done either one of these techniques, and while I'm generally a "learn what you need to know to do the project" type knitter I thought it would be helpful to actually have someone physically show me how to do it.  And of course, I had to take at least one of Franklin's classes (secret boyfriend remember?)  While I wasn't particularly doubtful of my ability to do either of these things before, now I know for sure how to do them, and I'm currently scanning patterns to do both in a sweater.  Fortunately, I had a little more focus on Friday and did get a picture of Franklin with Dolores in the background.

Friday afternoon was the first chance I had to do some shopping with all the vendors.  I had a couple of specific projects I was looking to find yarn for, so I focused on those mostly Friday, although I picked up a few things not on my list as well!

Saturday I had no classes, so I decided not to get up at the wee hours with the rest of the group, and instead slept a little longer and got to SAFF about 11:00 am.  One of our group has a vacation home about 45 minutes away from SAFF and she graciously lets us stay there.  Not only is it a huge money saver (more money for yarn & fiber & classes!) but it's nice to have a comfortable place to sit around together in the evening and show what we bought or made that day & just knit and socialize.

This was the day I made it over to the barns to see the animals.  Alpacas and llamas and goats and sheep.  Just about any fiber animal you can think of.  And because they're all so cute and furry I took lots of pictures.  I won't subject you to all of them, just some of the cutest.

Baby Suri Alpaca

Baby Alpaca

More Baby Alpacas

Llama

I admired this sheep's dreads

Nosy Sheep

This one just wanted you to scratch between his horns

Saturday night we joined Ann & Janis of the Carolina Fiber Girls podcast and a few others for dinner at the Sierra Nevada Brewery just down the road.  I'm not a beer drinker, but the food was pretty good and it's undeniably a gorgeous building.  I think I need to take Rob there the next time we're in the Asheville area.

Outside of the brewery

Vats of beer

Something to do with making beer

Sunday morning we took our time getting up, packing, and loading up the cars for the drive home.  Michiele was riding with me and we decided to make one more quick stop at SAFF on the way home.  A couple more purchases were made, and we headed home.  I'm so glad I took Monday off work too because besides needing to do laundry and grocery shopping, I need to some time to admire and inventory my haul from the event.

It's quite a haul, but almost all of it was bought with a specific project in mind.  That gorgeous teal grouping towards the bottom of the picture is already being knit into a sweater in fact.

All in all, another great year at SAFF.  The classes, the yarn, the fiber make it worth the trip every year, but the weekend with such great friends that share my love of all that SAFF offers make it more than just a trip.

Spin Stitch Knit Festival 2015

I've enjoyed having a few days off, but it's back to work tomorrow.  I got most of what I wanted to accomplished this weekend, not that it was an overly ambitious list to begin with, and I feel a little more organized at home heading into the start of a busy few months at work.

Saturday I went to a small new event in Stedman, NC called Spin Stitch Knit Festival 2015.  It was indeed a small event, but there were several nice vendors there and I came home with a few pretties.

The blue & yellow yarns on the left are both Whisper Fingering from Unplanned Peacock, an alpaca, silk, cashmere base that is sooooo soft.  They will probably be used together in a two-colored shawl.  The green/yellow yarn is also Unplanned Peacock in her Lustral Shawl, which is a fingering weight yarn in a 600 yard put up.  The yarn on the right is the event colorway, called Oceans 11, and it's from That Hooker Chick.

Also there was The Clay Sheep and I picked up a diz and some adorable stitch markers from her.

Until my friends Michiele and Roxie became bad influences I never bought buttons until I needed them for a specific project.  A couple of years ago they turned me to the dark side and my button stash has been slowly growing as well.  I added 4 of these gorgeous antique dragonfly buttons to my collection Saturday.  The picture doesn't do it justice, but it's hard to capture with all the shiny going on.

My friend Colleen went with me, and even though she's not a knitter or spinner she is a quilter, so she was both tolerant of my shopping and properly inquisitive about the various offerings and their purpose.  She even bought herself an Origami Owl bracelet, which is not spinning or knitting related, but I was glad she found something there she liked.

The event, though small, was worth the trip for me because I live only an hour away.  There were 9 or 10 vendors, and I figured if Unplanned Peacock was there it wouldn't be a total wasted trip.  They did have some food there, although we didn't actually eat anything there. They did offer some classes, but they didn't do a very good job of providing information ahead of time on what was and/or when those were being offered and I was only able to determine the exact classes and schedule the day before the event, at which point I had already made my plans.

Overall, if they do it again next year and it falls on a weekend I don't have other plans I might go again, but I'm not going to plan my weekend around being able to go.

Spinning My Wheels

I spent the afternoon in Chapel Hill with the Chapel Hill Spinners.  On the drive up, I had a plan.  That plan was to take lots of pictures of everyone spinning and all the lovely spinning wheels and spindles so I could share that with you here and fill up most of the page with pictures.

Yeah, well...I didn't take a single picture.  I got there and was having so much fun chatting and ooohing and aaahing over what everyone was doing that I just completely, and totally forgot until I was pulling out of the parking lot to head home.

There were a lot of lovely wheels and spindles and tons of gorgeous fiber being spun.  Maryann of Three Waters Farm also had some fabulous fiber for sale.

So even though my brilliant plan was a fail, you still get this post, just without all the pretty pictures.  But I did manage to get 2 oz. of my polwarth/silk spun and finished filling another bobbin, so you'll have to make do with a picture of that.

A little boring I know, but it will be fabulous when plied and dyed and knit into a sweater!

Anyway, if you're a spinner and live within a reasonable distance of Chapel Hill, come join us.  It's a friendly group of people of all kinds and very informal. If you're not a spinner, but would like to learn, Maryann does a free drop spindle lesson an hour before the meeting time every time we meet.  Meetings are once a month either on a Sunday afternoon or a Wednesday night and they're posted on the Facebook page linked above.  We're skipping August, so next meeting is September and the tentative date is September 17.

Friends & Fiber - Part 2

Although the fiber retreat was in Candor, just south of Asheville, we actually stayed in Burnsville, just north of Asheville because Roxie has a very kind friend Maryann that has a house there she lets us use on occasion.  Not having to pay for a hotel room really helps out and we REALLY appreciate her letting us stay (I don't think she even knows about this blog, so I'm not saying that just to suck up either).

Silk scarf dyed by Roxie

Roxie had a class Saturday morning to learn how to do another kind of dyeing, so we headed back down to the retreat for the morning.   The plan was to spend the morning at the retreat, have some lunch somewhere and then head back to the house to spend the afternoon crafting.  But the great thing about traveling with Michiele and Roxie is that plans can change and we all go with the flow.

The retreat was actually held at a middle school just up the road from the Friends & Fiberworks store, so after we left there we stopped by the actual store to browse around (and maybe make a couple of purchases).  While there we found out about yet another yarn shop just north of Asheville on our way back to Burnsville, so we had to stop there as well.  That store, The Knitting Diva, is relatively new, but it is an awesome store.  They dealt oh so well with our particular brand of crazy while we were there & we will definitely visit it again when we're back in the area.  I may have spent a little money in that one. (Have you been keeping count?  That's five yarns stores in the general Asheville area.)

Cute sheep outside Yummi Yarns

There's also a yarn shop in Burnsville called Yummi Yarns.  We had been there before, but they've moved to a new location since our last visit, so we had to check it out as well.  I did buy a skein of sock yarn there to make Rob another pair of socks.

By the time we got back to the house around dinner time, our massive crafting plans had dwindled a bit, but that doesn't mean we did nothing.  Michiele had brought her drum carder so I spent a little time turning some fiber I had dyed at Carolina Fiber Frolic, but wasn't really thrilled with into something that I may actually want to spin.

This, which was muddy and kind of compacted

Turned into these, which are light and airy and hopefully will be nice to spin

I also used the drum carder to blend two different colored fibers together into batts.

This became....

This

We took our time heading out Sunday.  We stopped by to see a former coworker of Roxie's who has recently moved to the area and then had a wonderful brunch at Kirkwood's Cafe before finally getting on the road.

Overall, a great time, and I can't wait to do it again!

Friends & Fiber - Part 1

I love the "epic" part

A couple of weekends ago I went to the mountains for the Friends & Fiberworks Summer Retreat with my friends Roxie and Michiele.  As usual when the 3 of us go somewhere, we had a great time, did a little shopping, and had a lot of laughs.

Friday afternoon Michiele & I took a class on Photographing Your Fiber with Franklin Habit.   This is the 2nd class I've taken with Franklin, and I just love him.  If we didn't both already have husbands I'd ask him to marry me.  But back to the class, although it doesn't show in any of the pictures in this post, I did learn a lot about how my little point and shoot camera works and tips for lighting, etc. that I can use even with my iphone.  Hopefully one of these days I'll sit down and go through my camera manual and really learn how to do something with all he taught us.

Miss Babs was also attending the retreat as a student and was in Franklin's class too.  She's a fiber celebrity in her own right because she dyes the most gorgeous yarn and fiber, so I had a double fan girl moment.

That's the only class I took, but there was a small market there, so I did a little shopping as well.  I bought my Cricket loom (the subject of yesterday's post) there as well as a little yarn and fiber.  But of course the shopping didn't end there.

We went into downtown Asheville where there are three shops that sell yarn, count them, three in one downtown!  Only one of them is exclusively a yarn shop, but the other two have more than just a small amount of yarn.  I managed to curb my spending and not buy anything at any of them except for a couple of pairs of needle tips I needed.

Check out the cute sock monkey ninjas!

And sock monkey pirates too!

The perfect accessory for UNC football games dontcha' think?  If I could find a pattern for this my entire family would get them for Christmas!

Also while we were downtown, Michiele proved that I am not the only person who has become obsessed with crafts.  When we were at the Carolina Fiber Frolic in March she learned how to eco-dye using plants and flowers.  As we were walking around she noticed some marigolds at the end of their life and couldn't resist deadheading them all so she could use them to dye.

I'm sure the Battery Park Apartments thanks her.

And all that was just Friday!  I'll tell you about the rest of the weekend tomorrow.

In Which I Learn ALL the Fiber Crafts

Rob says I've become obsessed.  I prefer to think of it as having found something I enjoy and having fun with it.

Before I decided to learn to spin, I was contemplating learning to weave.  My yarn stash was growing and I thought that weaving would be another way to use up some of it.  I did some weaving on a floor loom when I was a kid at Camp Yonahlossee (now Yonahlossee Resort) and my mother still has the pillow I made, and I think a place mat my sister made as well.  But that was the extent of my experience. I was debating getting a floor loom, but decided I didn't really have the floor space, and then I ultimately decided that learning to spin was what I wanted to do next.

Fast forward about a year, and now that I'm spinning and creating even more yarn, the urge to weave returned.  I decided to go the cheaper and smaller route to begin with, so a couple of weeks ago I bought a 15" Schacht Cricket rigid heddle loom.  I finally got around to warping it and figuring out how to use it, and here's what I've done so far.

I started with a simple scarf project in the book that came with the loom, and using the yarn that came with the loom as well.  It's a good thing, because what you can't see in that picture is how horrible the majority of my edges are and the 4 or 5 places where I missed a thread or two when running the shuttle through the warp.  You might be able to tell where I'm not quite even all the time either, but that's what practice is for I suppose.


 This is a small loom, so I may still want a floor loom eventually, but for now I think I'll have fun making scarves, maybe some coasters, and who knows, maybe even some place mats, a la Camp Yonahlossee.

And there are still more fiber crafts to conquer....bobbin lace anyone?

The Closest I'll Ever Get to the Tour de France

The Tour de France started yesterday, July 5th and goes until July 27th, with only the 15th and 21st as rest days.  That's 21 days of riding a bicycle, in other words, a lot of damn bicycle riding.

In the fiber world however, that means it's time for Tour de Fleece!  Yes, fleece, as in the wool off of a sheep.  The primary goal of Tour de Fleece is to spin every day that the Tour de France rides.

There's no official website, but there are a lot of groups and teams on Ravelry participating.  Each person chooses their own goals for the event, and some of the groups do prizes for meeting your goals, but it's really just about setting a goal for your spinning and trying to achieve it. 

This is my first year participating since it's the first year I've been a spinner.  My goals are pretty modest in my opinion.  My primary goal is to spin at least 10 minutes every day of the event.  This week should be relatively quiet at work, so I should be home at a decent hour every night, but who knows what it will be like after that, so just making time to spin every day might turn out to be a challenge.

My secondary goal is to get as much of this box of fiber spun as possible.  That lovely dreaminess is 40 ounces of Three Waters Farm polwarth/silk.  The plan is to spin it into a 3-ply yarn, dye it an as yet undetermined color, and knit a sweater out of it.  40 ounces is probably way more than I need for a sweater, even for my larger size, but I wanted to have plenty to mess up with in both the spinning and the dyeing.

I started spinning this fiber a little this week before the official start of Tour de Fleece, but I've almost got one bobbin full of singles.  That's not quite 4 ounces on the bobbin at the moment.

Knowing me, 21 days of spinning the exact same thing might get a little boring, so I may spin something with a little color a few of those days (I can already imagine how handy it would be to have a 2nd wheel), but right now I'm motivated to get a lot of this done.  The polwarth/silk blend drafts wonderfully so it's very relaxing to spin.

That's not all I've got going on though, stay tuned tomorrow for a peek at my newest fiber craft.

Spinning a Yarn

I've really been enjoying spinning lately.  Practice makes you a better spinner and being better at it makes me enjoy it more I guess.

I finished some Three Waters Farm Bluefaced Leicester (BFL) right before I went to Carolina Fiber Frolic, and I chain plied it while I was at the event.  I still put a little too much twist in the single and in the ply, but it's a usable yarn.  I washed it today finally and it helped relax the twist a bit.

Skeined up, but before washing

After washing

Friday night I finished spinning the second bobbin of a braid of Polwarth/Silk from Gale's Art  and didn't even think about the fact that I should have let that bobbin "rest" overnight before plying because I was too excited.  This is probably my best skein so far as far as twist goes.  The singles were probably a little over twisted, but it all seemed to even out in the plying because the yarn is very balanced.  I did this as a two ply fractal spin and I like the way it turned out.

Right after plying

After a bath

Last night I pulled out some more Three Waters Farm BFL that are dyed in special colorways for a Ravelry group I'm in. 

The multi-colored one is called Blue Sunset, and the other is just Burnt Orange.  My original plan was to spin each braid into a single and then ply them together in a two-ply.  I did a sample spin last night and I liked the resulting yarn. 

Bad picture, but you get the general idea

But I started spinning the Blue Sunset first, and the more I spin, the more I just can't see diluting these colors by plying with the orange all the way through.  So I think I've decided that I'm going to chain ply both braids and that way I'll have a multi-colored yarn and a coordinating orange yarn that I can use in a project together somehow.

You can't see the orange underneath, but this shows most of the rest of the colors.

I'm spinning this braid a lot slower this time and working on making my singles more consistent in thickness.  I still have so much to learn about spinning that sometimes I feel like I don't have a clue what I'm doing, but then I remember there was a time when I felt that way about knitting (not that I know everything there is to know about knitting).

Now I just need to figure out what to knit with the new yarn I'm making!

New Year, New Approach

This little guy has nothing to do with the New Year, but he makes me smile.

I don't know what it is about the New Year that makes me feel like I have a clean slate.  It's not like there's any real change that occurs between December 31 and January 1, but it just feels like a fresh start.

I long ago gave up the idea of resolutions in favor of goals.  Resolutions always result in a feeling of guilt when they're broken, as almost always happens.  Goals feel more ongoing somehow, like something I'm striving towards rather than a set guideline or rule.  It's all terminology and semantics I suppose, but the word goal feels less strict to me.

This year I'm modifying my approach a little more and I'm stating several broad goals for the year, but I'm setting much smaller short term goals in each area.  I'm hopeful that this will keep me a little more focused in the short term.  Sort of a take it a day at a time approach, but on a monthly basis (or in some cases even weekly).  So rather than saying I'll post here 10 times per month, I'm saying my goal is to write blog posts more often, and my specific goal for January is at least 10 posts after this one.

I'm keeping most of the specifics to myself for the moment, although I may talk about some of them in the future, but here are my broad goals for the year.

• Health - Eat healthier, exercise more, lose weight
• Writing - Write more in all aspects, including blog posts, personal journal, short stories, novel
• Fiber Arts - Use my existing yarn/fiber stash and limit additions to stash, spin more

Fun with Friends and Fiber

I spent a long weekend in the mountains with my friends Michiele and Roxie at the Southeastern Animal Fiber Fair (SAFF) where we engaged in our idea of fun... yarn, fiber, and classes on knitting and spinning.

Roxie picked me up Thursday morning and I was so excited I had all my stuff piled in the driveway waiting. 

Note the essentials: Cherry Coke Zero and wine

 We stopped a couple of hours up the road to add Michiele to the journey.  After a stop in Black Mountain for lunch and a little wander through a couple of shops, we made it to the place we were staying in Hendersonville about 4:00.  Roxie had reserved us a nice room in some one's house through Airbnb, a site I had never used before, but will definitely check out the next time Rob & I are looking for a place to stay.

Friday the fiber fun began!  We were at the Ag Center at 9:00 when the doors opened.  I wandered around all morning looking at all the great stuff for sale in vendors' booths and buying lots of goodies.  As a new spinner I wanted to get a variety of different fibers to try out, but I also couldn't resist some yarn as well. 

My total haul from both Friday & Saturday

Friday afternoon I had a class on working with antique and vintage knitting patterns with Franklin Habit.  He is not only a great teacher, but is hilarious and absolutely adorable!  I highly recommend any of his classes, but being a bit of a history geek myself, I love his passion for the history of knitting.

Franklin modeling a traveling cap

The "real" Franklin

After class I wandered around and saw some of the animals.  There were alpacas, llamas, sheep and goats, and I could have sworn I took some pictures, but apparently not.  I met back up with my friends and we finally left a little after 6:00 to head to dinner. But first we made a pit stop at a local yarn shop that Roxie and I had never been to.  What?  You think we should have had enough yarn by that point?  Never.

Saturday morning all three of us took a class on designing a triangular shawl with Vithard Villumsen a designer from Denmark.  Another great class, and instructor.  Vithard is so cute, we all wanted to take him home with us.  He was wearing one of his new designs, the1sleeved, and we all fell in love with it.  He let us all try it on and I'm not kidding when I say it fit and looked great on everyone.  He was such a good sport too, because we dragged him after class to the Miss Babs booth to help us all pick out colors to make one!  Unfortunately, none of us remembered to take a picture of Vithard, because we were too busy acting like 12 year old fan girls, but if you follow the link for the1sleeved pattern, you will see him modeling the design.

My yarn for the1sleeved

After another hour or so of wandering and shopping, we were all starving, so we headed in to Hendersonville for a late lunch/early dinner, a quick visit to another local yarn store, and then headed back to the room early.  Of course we had to show and tell, and wind our yarn to start Vithard's pattern before bed, but it was another great day.

Sunday morning Michiele had a class, so she got up and left, and Roxie and I sat around for a while before finally getting on the road mid-morning.  I got home Sunday afternoon, tired and glad to be home, but it was a fabulous weekend and I can't wait for next year!