Table Legs Make Great Pillows

This can't be comfortable...

Table Legs Make Great Pillows

Silly Puppy

Have a great weekend!

Hemlock Ring Blanket

For my 250th post, I have this to present to you:

Hemlock Ring Blanket

This baby turned out gorgeous and matches my kitchen floor nicely don't you think? On the last row before the edging, I ended up with 504 stitches on the 40 inch cable. If I had had any more stitches to put on it, I think the cables would have exploded.

It turned out to be approximately 52 inches in diameter and took 131 pins to pin it all out. I used quilter's T-pins to do this. The T-pins are far stronger than regular pins and very easy to work with.

You should have seen me blocking this on The Eldest's bed last night. I had my measuring tape, a bucket full of pins and one cat (to supervise my work of course) all on the bed. I stretched and tugged and pinned and tossed the cat. Then I stretched and tugged and re-pinned and re-tossed the cat off the bed all over again. It went on for quite a while. I have much stronger arm muscles now. Everyone should try cat tossing for super toned muscles.

I measured each section and made sure that the measurements were the same for each of them. The fan part, from the center hole to the fartherest tip measured 26 inches. The fan, from hole to bottom of the dip measured 20 inches. It took a lot of fiddling to get this all uniform, but it worked beautifully.

To recap this project:

Pattern: Jared Flood's (aka Brooklyn Tweed) Hemlock Ring Blanket
Yarn: Cascade Ecological Wool
Color: 8087
Needles: size 10
Time begun: May 3, 2008
Finished: May 14, 2008

The project goes really fast until you get around row 67 or so. After that it took a minimum of 15 minutes to do each row and a max of about 25 minutes. The edging took the longest time to do.

Took me a whole 11 days to complete. Now imagine how much less time this would have taken me if I didn't have a two year old menace running around the house and demanding my attention 24/7!

From Birds to Blobs

We now go from yesterday's birds to todays blobs:

Hemlock Blob

The hemlock is finished! Yeah! I now have to block it and pin it out. The best place that I have to do this is the Eldest's bed. So tonight, he will be "Camping out" on the floor in his bedroom so that I can get this baby blocked and dry. I'm so excited!

I know I promised pics and details of the Mother's Day project, but it will have to wait. It hasn't gotten to my Mom yet. So, details to come.

Bird babies!

This morning I was having some tea and looking out the bay window in our breakfast nook and noticed some bird activity. You see, we had some birds move into one of our bird houses. They, in turn, had a family of birds, but I haven't been able to identify them yet.

Usually the mom does a quick in and a quick out of the bird house. She's a typical busy mommy, she has things to do you know. So I haven't been able to see what kind of bird she is. Last year we had a family of chickadees. This year?

Well today I got a real treat. I saw a bird sitting in the hole of the house. I knew it wasn't the mom, she never sits still. I grabbed the camera and went in the back yard. You wouldn't believe how close I got to the baby. I could have reached out and touched it, no joke. Mommy bird was up in the branches cussing me out. I was good, I didn't touch it. But I wanted to! It was so freakin' cute!

I got some great photos. Take a look. If anyone can identify them, please let me know!

Click to enlarge - check out his little feet!

Just checkin' out the neighborhood

Mommy bird

Not Monday, Fiberday!

Today was take a break from knitting day. I'll pick the Hemlock back up again tonight, but I just couldn't look at it this morning. I'm up to four hundred seventy something stitches per row and it's damn depressing. Takes forever to go around it once. It's fine on the interesting rows with yarnovers and psso's and ktogs and stuff. But the plain stockinette? Not so much.

So. Today was a fibery kinda day. I'm still slogging thru the pretty stuff that the Eldest and I dyed. It's turning out great and my spindling is getting much better. But. It takes me a while to spin on the drop spindle. You can see the fiber progression starting in the top right corner of the photo and going counter-clockwise. Roving, split roving, pre-drafted roving, spun. All while watching episodes of Time Team, a British archaeology show that I've been watching online and that I'm totally addicted too. It's hard being a history geek sometimes.

Not Monday, Fiberday!

I want a wheel so freakin' bad! I could spin so much faster.

I've put stuff up for sale on Craigslist to try and earn the money for a wheel. I've only managed to sell one thing so far, a crib. No one seems to want the 55 gallon aquarium and a ton of aquarium equipment. If you know anyone in the Atlanta area interested, let me know! I put a porcelain barbie for sale up on Ebay. No takers so far. Can't get rid of this either and it would be great for a party.

I did sell 3 skeins of bamboo yarn on Ravelry. Oh well. It'll happen sooner or later, something's got to sell sometime.

Lest you think...

...I'm not Knitting, well, I am!


I've been knitting like a madwoman, at least, as much as my achy wrists and fingers will allow.

I've been concentrating on the Hemlock Ring Blanket mostly. I felt like I was making amazing progess for a while there. Then I got to row 62. This row and the next four took me a full 15 minutes to do each row. By the time I got to row 72, each row was taking me 20 minutes. Why? There are 312 stitches per row. This circle is getting out of hand. It'll get worse. Row 82? 376 stitches. Not looking forward to it. there are a total of 87 rows for this blanket. I have instructions to make it bigger, but I don't think I'll be able to handle it. Throw size will be just fine thank you.

I feel like I'm on a treadmill and going no where really fast. I try knitting quick, then I tense up and then my arms and wrists and fingers all go kaput and I have to stop.

Anyway, here's a few pics of the lovely brown monster. The second and third pics are the most indicative of the color.

Feather and Fan Section

Center was placed over a bowl so you could see it better:

Enlarged Leaf

Mom's Day Project Part One

I've worked with children for years now and I have an infinite patience with them. Except, that is, with my own. Why? You'd think it would be the opposite, wouldn't you?

So we began the Mother's Day project for both Grandmothers. The Youngest reacted very negatively to the whole experience because he hates getting stuff on his hands. He then proceeded to wipe his hands all down his legs. Did I mention that we were using a bright yellow acrylic paint? I had the Eldest on standby to help me out. I asked for a wet paper towel. I did not however, ask for one that was dripping wet. sigh. Big mess.

Pretend you don't see this Mom

A good time was not had by all. In fact, I don't think anyone enjoyed the process. I sorta lost my temper a little. Thankfully I had the presence of mind to do this on the kitchen tile floor and not the kitchen table. No telling how much acrylic paint would have found it's way onto the chairs, chair pads, table, etc...

Having my children working together on projects like this is like herding cats. It just never works out the way I want it to. I'll show you how it all turns out on Monday. I've still got a few steps to do, but thankfully the rest of the project can be done solo. It should be super cute. The GrandMom's are gonna love it.

Doesn't everybody's desk look like this?

Let's see, there's:

Vino - to calm the nerves after dealing with the Youngest
Snackies - almonds to be exact - keeps me away from the cookies
Calculator - for all that mathy stuff
Knitting Pattern - nuff said
Hemlock Blanket project - one of 3 wips going now - now on the 40" cables
Super Secret project - all I can show you at this time

Click to see a bigger mess

On the kid front - I swear that my kids subscribe to the "if a little is good, more is better" philosophy. As if the Youngest hadn't done enough damage to his face over the past month, he added a lovely golf ball sized knot to his forehead this morning before 8:00am. He then fell twice more and turned that goose egg into an ostrich egg. It's humongous, but at least there's no concussion. Small blessings.

I may have to start sitting on that child to keep him from running and tripping all over himself and bashing his head all in. I've got enough gray hair, I don't need for him to keep adding more!

Whole lotta nuthin'

I gotta whole lot of nuthin' for ya today.

I did do some spinning today, but it was in short spurts and I don't have a lot to show off.

Most of the day I've spent the day dealing with a 2 year old who refused to take a nap and is now cranky as all get out.

He also had me playing one of his favorite games. It's called "fall-ning". He grabs my hand or shirt and pulls me down onto the floor with him so that we're "Fall-ning". I'm supposed to land on top of him and squish him. That's it. Exciting huh? Yeah, I think so too. One more game of fall-ning and I just might scream.

I need a few of you to scrape together a few pennies and send them my way so that I can hire a nanny, and while we're at it, a maid. The current nanny and maid is terrible, a great Mommy who plays fall-ning, but a terrible nanny and maid.

Happy Cinco de Mayo

Happy Cinco de Mayo Everyone!


Since I've been having the wrist pain while working on the cabled pullover, I took a break from it over the weekend. And since I get the fidgets when I don't have anything to do, I started yet another project.

I've been wanting to do the Hemlock Ring Blanket by Jared Flood, aka Brooklyntweed. Nobody does knitting ph0tography like Jared and I mean nobody. That's what suckered me into this project, his fantastic pics of his blanket. I picked a darker chocolate brown, #8087 of the Ecowool than his pattern calls for. I love dark chocolate. Mmm, dark chocolate.

Here it is so far:


It looks more like a beret than a blanket at this stage, but it's coming along.

And guess what? I worked for several hours on this on Saturday and didn't have one wrist pain. I'm guessing that it's definitely the cables that are causing the trouble.

I've also been working on my secret project that I can't show you until June which really sucks. It'll be done long before then. I'll probably post a Ravelry link to it when it's done. The recipient isn't a member there and can't get access to see it that way.

I found a site, Pursebuzz.com today while I was messing around on youtube. I was looking for new hairstyle stuff. This is the cutest girl. She has several cute how to hairstyle videos and I'm planning on doing a few of the ones that she demonstrates. Just thought I'd share. She's got beauty stuff as well, but I love the hair how to's.

Cartoon influences

It can now be proven that the Youngest watches wayyyyyy too much Scooby Doo cartoons. He is now running around the house with his arms up in the air making a God awful noise. It took me a few times seeing him do this to figure out what the heck he was doing. He was pretending to be one of the scary bad guys. The first time it was a ghost. I know this, because he keeps saying "Ghost!" as he does it. The next time he was saying "WereWoo!" That would be Werewolf to you and me. Today while he was running with his hands in the air his word was "Muh-my" or Mummy. Sigh.

How can I ever take him to the church nursery when some of his first vocabulary words are ghost, werewolf and mummy? Not exactly what they want to hear coming out of a two year old's mouth.


But. It gets worse. Oh yes, it does. He has also been watching the old Johnny Quest cartoons. The bad guys in those are far worse than the Scooby Doo ones. In Scooby Doo, nobody gets really hurt or anything. In Johnny Quest, people are killed, although you never see it. You'd just see a ship blowing up or something. But, the bad guys go around yelling "kill them!"

So, yeah. Guess what my little guy was running around yelling? "kee-ill! kee-ill!"

If he wasn't so darn cute and funny while doing it, as a Christian mom, I'd be mortified. It's really difficult raising a parrot.

Cub Scouts and knitting stuff

Sorry for the lapse in blogging. I usually blog in the evening when I get the children settled. But last night?

Last night was a big night in the Eldest's Cub Scout world. He got his Tiger badge finally. I'm super proud of him, he worked really hard to earn it. He also got a boatload of other patches/pins/belt loops/etc. When one of the important rank badges are earned, the scout's parents get roped into the ceremony. I felt like a complete dork up there. I'm involved, but only with helping him earn other things. I don't usually attend meetings or go camping and stuff. So I was really uncomfortable being pulled up there to do the ceremony, especially since I don't know many of the parents there. Here's a pic:


One cool thing happened there though. I was talking to one of the parents and felt someone tap me on the shoulder. I turned to see who it was and it turned out to be someone I had gone to high school with. His kid has joined up for scouts too. It really is a very small world huh?

On the knitting front, I started on the other sleeve of the cabled pullover. I can still only do about 10 or 12 rows before it makes my hands and wrists hurt. I'm not sure why or what I'm doing wrong. I'm still not sure what to do about the sleeve length, but right now I'm leaning towards hemming it later.

I got a pattern in the mail today. I'd show it to you, but it's for a super secret project. Hi MOM! :) I need to go pick out the yarn for it and get started on it. It's sitting on my desk in front of me as I type and teasing me. I want to start on it NOW!

I'm trying to be a good girl and not have too many projects started at once, but it's really hard... temptation is such a bad thing.

Knitting question

I finished one sleeve this weekend for the cabled pullover. While my stitch gauge was dead on, it turns out that my row gauge was not. It's a bit over. When totaled the full length, it's about an inch or inch and a half more than I'm needing.



The rings at the left of the photo will be at the hands the ones on the right will connect with the yoke near the shoulder. I don't really want to rip back because the end I left off at are on the right. If I rip too much, I risk messing up connecting to the yoke.

So what should I do?

• I can go ahead and rip it anyway and take the risk of it not fitting to the yoke correctly, but then will also possibly have the problem of having the two sleeves not looking identical.
  
• I could also leave the knitting as it is and do a hem at the very end of the sleeve once the sweater is pieced together.
  

It's possible that blocking will help some, but I doubt it.

Are there any other suggestions? How would you handle this?

New Toy

While I was away with the kids this weekend and my husband was supposed to be doing important stuff like, oh, say, taxes and legal business type crap, what did he do? He made me this:

Lazy Kate & Bobbins

It's a copy of something I found on etsy last week that I thought was incredibly clever and simple. Since it is a copy, I won't give you the specific measurements that the hubby used to make it. If you don't have a handy man around to whip you one up though, go to etsy and do a search for a lazy kate for drop spindlers. These are so handy and so worth having around for the drop spindler!

I can give you the basics though. He made me 4 bobbins made out of pvc pipe and end caps. He then made a base with 4 dowels placed into it. I love it. It's my early Mom's day gift from him. It has already made life much easier for storing singles and then plying them together.

I completed plying some of them this morning and I'm tickled with how it turned out:

Ready for blocking

All I need to do now with this is block it. I'm waiting to block all of the yarns in this colorway together at the same time, so it will be a while.

Don't you like my new toy?

Yuck and OOH!

YUCK!
You know those weird searches that people do in the search engines that lead to your site? Well, there's one that's kind of creeping me out.

One of my first posts was about a pair of socks that I made for the Eldest. In the post I mentioned that they were silly socks for silly boy feet. Did you know that there are people out there searching for boy feet? Are there really pedophile foot fetishists out there? That's just sick people. It kind of grosses me out to think that some strange dude is out there getting off to a photo of The Eldest's feet. Yuck. What is the world coming to?


OOH!
Anyway, I have no new updates on the knitting. I did about 10 rows today and my wrists starting hurting. I need to inspect how I'm knitting. They shouldn't be hurting after only 10 rows even if the cables are slightly tight.

I do however, have a pic of the yarn that I've spun up.

Here is the roving that I started out with:


Here is how it spun up:

Click to see the pretty colors!

I still haven't made a decision on a name for the colorway yet, but I really appreciate the suggestions so far. I really didn't expect that the color in the plied yarn would look like this. It's absolutely amazing to me the difference of colors from roving to yarn. Magic!

In a few hours I'm off to the lake with the kiddos. Poor hubby has to stay home and be productive. Me, I'll be sharing 2 year old temper tantrums with the Grandparents. I hope everyone has a great weekend!

An Engineer's Guide to Cats

Just thought I'd Share - This video, An Engineer's Guide to cats completely cracks me up:

Seeing Red!

Today's post is brought to you by the number 2 and the color red. Yep, there's two red objects for your viewing pleasure.

When I got home from child chauffering this afternoon, there was a package waiting for me. A few months ago I had entered a contest from the Meema blog. I was a runner up, but she said she'd send alpaca my way anyway. I had forgotten all about it until I saw the city where it came from - St. Paul, MN. Oh boy! Alpaca!

This is way cool! Look what she sent:

It's red alpaca!

How sweet this lady is! There is just the barest hint of yellow mixed in with the red. Gorgeous! It's incredibly soft too. The Youngest grabbed it out of my hands before I could do a thing and rubbed it all over his face. Luckily for me, he missed wiping the snotty nose with it.

Anyway, a big THANK YOU to MEEMA!


For our second red object, I lay before you a partial sleeve:


This sucker is taking a while. And it's not like I haven't been working on it either. This may be, next to Annie Modesitt's corset, the most complicated thing that I've knit. Some of my cables tend to get a little tight and after a while it makes my wrist hurt to knit on it. But it's turning out so great! (ahem, So far. I don't want to jinx myself.)

Mishap at Grandma's - Pic intensive

While I was at my spinning class on Saturday, there was a mishap at Grandma's house. Unbeknownst to me, the Youngest was hell-bent on tripping over his own feet and bashing his face on a bed rail, all while playing tag with his Grandmother. My hubby already told his Mom that if this sort of thing keeps up she just might lose babysitting privileges. He was kidding, of course. :) There's no way someone could have prevented something like this from happening. My kids always manage to hurt themselves when they're right next to a supervising adult. :sigh:

When I got to her house, there was a small quarter of an inch cut, or deep scratch across his nose almost between his eyes. Nobody thought much about it at the time. There were no bruises or swelling and he didn't even cry over it, not once. So, no big deal, right? The next day though....

Take a look at this. I've taken a picture each day so you can see the progress of bruising and swelling. I've been terrified of taking him out of the house for fear that someone would think I had abused him.

Sunday Morning - notice the swelling between the eyes.

Closeup of swelling - It actually got bigger than this.Monday afternoon
Today

The swelling is gone now, but he's starting to resemble a racoon. How do you keep a rough and ready two year old from knocking himself silly?

Taking a pic of Mommy taking a pic of him:

A different fiber-y goodness

Late last year (Oct or Nov?) I ordered several pounds of roving from Sheep Shed Studio. They have some great stuff. Most of it is rescued Mill Ends that for whatever reason doesn't get spun, but it's all excellent for spinning. It was all natural colored and has been waiting patiently for a new look. Last night, it happened.

The Eldest and I had a craft project. He just loves those. We weighed out approx. 4 oz. of roving and soaked it in warm water and a generous dash of vinegar for 30 minutes, then let the water out and gently pressed down on the wool to get the excess water out.

Taking it's bath:

While it was soaking, the fun began. We got out a spare pack of Easter egg dyes and added 1 dye tablet, 3 tbsp of vinegar and 1/4 water to each cup.


We placed one layer of roving in the bottom of my crockpot (these are food safe dyes so it was okay to use my one and only crockpot. If you use acid dyes, please don't use the crockpot again for food, make it a dedicated crafting crockpot instead.) On the bottom layer we drizzled the purple dye and two blue dyes over the roving. We then added another layer of roving and drizzled the two greens and one yellow on it. Then the red, pink and orange was used for the top layer. I added a bit of water to the pot by pouring it onto the top rim and letting it drip down the sides making sure not to pour it directly on the roving itself.

Looks bright doesn't it?

I was very paranoid that I would felt my roving. I made sure not to stir or agitate the water in any way in order to avoid felting. The colors looked very intense in the pot didn't they? I was also worried that we would get "mud" colors since we used 9 different colors, but oh was it worth it!

The roving sat in my crockpot for 3 hours on low. Then I turned it off, poured out the water and let it all come to room temp before rinsing in lukewarm water. The roving then went into the washer for a few minutes of spin cycle and was hung to dry the rest of the way.

This is what came out of all that work:

Check out the colors! - click to enlarge for fine detail.

It's perfect and ready for spinning! What should I name this colorway?

It just gets better and better!

Oh the spinning is getting better!

It's amazing to me how much learning on a wheel has helped me with the drop spindle. I'm getting consistent, thin singles now. Which, on the whole, is a great thing since I don't have a wheel yet and have gotten no bites on the things I've put up on craigslist that would finance that wheel.

Has anyone heard of the "Miss America" ply? At least that was what one of my instructors this weekend called it. It's great for making sample size skeins, not so much for full size. It has worked great so far.

This ply begins with you wrapping one end of your singles around your middle finger a few times and then moving the wrap to around your hand and continuing to wrap until you get to the end of the single. You then unwrap the single from around your middle finger, then put both ends together and attach them to either the spindle or your wheel. As your wheel or spindle begins to be twisted to the left, you move your wrist so that the hand moves up and down slightly, thus allowing the yarn to move off of your hand from both top and bottom. It really is difficult to write this down. I'll definitely get this for you in a video sometime soon.

I have been scouring the web for videos on plying and there are very few for the drop spindle. I hate that. For those of us who don't have the money to go take a lot of classes or don't have access to someone who can mentor us, it's so frustrating. (Especially for those of us in warmer climates where there just aren't that many spinners let alone knitters.) I hadn't been able to really "get it" from reading about it. I needed to see it either in person or in a short video. Why aren't there more out there?


In the pic below is some examples of this weekend's spinning adventures. The skein on top was done on a wheel and plied with a wheel. The bottom one (which I'm quite proud of) was done on the drop spindle and plied with the spindle. Both were done with the "Miss America" ply.

Click to enlarge me!

And now that I've written up this post, I'm going to sit and watch my site statistics to see how many hits I get for "Miss America". It should be amusing to see how many people click on this post expecting to see long-legged voluptuous women instead of long-skeined voluptuous yarn. :)