Superstition from FiberOptic.

I just finished the two on the left (the one on the right is from before.) The new skeins are sock weight, and Navajo plied to keep the colors in solid blocks.

I am also working on buttoning up some sewing projects. First there were the needle rolls:

Even though this one has my knitting needles in it, I’m keeping one of the other ones, my needles are purely for display purposes.

I feel so organized.

And then there were my bloomers  and chemise. Those are finished now, but I’m still holding off on the hardware for a corset. Should a busk and boning magically appear on my sewing table that would be finished next, but I’m not going to count on it happening any time soon. I finished my last corset by gutting the hardware from a bustier, for better or for worse, I’m all out of bustiers that I’m willing to chop apart.

So that’s pretty much it for now, at least until I run into some more slightly less than finished projects.

What have I done with the real me? Obviously, I am not me. I just can’t be.

Look at my poor dog. Georgia knows that I’ve been taken over by some alien life form that is controlling my central nervous system and it makes her sad.

She is overwhelmed by the responsibility of saving me (and the rest of humanity) from a sinister force that sends out parasitic drones to pull us down into the hive mind.

Or, she’s just enjoying the remaining bits of residual butt heat from my husband’s chair.

I can’t tell.

Black Coffee sock yarn is officially finished. So mood controlling alien parasites can’t be all that bad.

Right?

It’s not like my theoretical mind controlling alien parasite is making me listen to Phil Collins or Kenny G. Or making me read Altas Shrugged, or design handbags from human skin (you know, things that are *truly* evil.)

The Black Coffee roving from FiberOptic is almost sock yarn now.

Please excuse the greenish hue, my camera does that under fluorescent lights. The greenish hue doesn’t exist in real life and I’m sure it could be corrected in Photoshop except that my attempts at correcting it turned out far worse than the original.

Note to self: If I *must* own expensive software, I might want to learn how to use it before it is obsolete.

At least I managed to get an accurate picture of the finished Dragon Tile.

I was worried that the red wouldn’t stand out against the gray background but it seems to stand out just enough.

Good lighting didn’t hurt either.

I’m itching to do some botanical dissections in thread. I’m thinking pillow covers.

The above paragraph probably explains why my husband rarely buys me flowers or houseplants doesn’t it?

All I need is tasty handpainted roving.

My family disagrees, for some reason they think its more convenient to have food and running water. I’ll never understand them.

This a sport weight that I made from spinning Moonlightbaker‘s Blue Steel roving.

40/60 bamboo/merino blend. I was sorely tempted to not ply the singles and just use them as is for sock yarn, and I probably would have if I hadn’t added so much twist when I was spinning.

The plan was to do a second Baby Surprise Jacket for Lexi, but I’m debating now– I’m thinking it might be fun to make her a kimono or ballet sweater from it. So many decisions.

Then I spun up some Superstition superwash merino from FiberOptic.

The squish factor is unbelievable. I’m very tempted to knit myself some socks from this yarn but I’m keeping my options open– it seems a shame to hide such pretty yarn on my feet. A new hat wouldn’t kill me. Or a little shrug.

Or I could just put the skein in a gallon sized ziplock bag and tape it to my chest with a note saying “I spun this.” (Yes, fashionable and bust enhancing– all the kids are doing it nowadays.)

Regardless, I decided I needed more of this good stuff and put in another order. I don’t know if I’ll spin up the second batch the same way, but I want to spin more of it.

My books finally came from Amazon. I’d ordered One Skein Wonders and EZs Knitting Workshop– and those are what came in the box so I’m pretty content.

I’m only slightly disgruntled because I was hoping there’d be more in the way of patterns using finer yarns and smaller needles in One Skein Wonders– I’m tired of doing math on patterns in order to get them to fit the yarn that I actually own. Not to mention the book pokes at my rant button; not everything that can be knitted should be knitted, some things really ought not be knitted.

Example: Coasters.

Don’t get me wrong, knitted coasters are cute. I just imagine setting my coffee cup on a poufy coaster and seeing it topple over and poof! The cuteness is gone as the searing hot coffee hits my skin and the loss of caffeine becomes a cold hard reality.

Not to say it’s a bad book or that I dislike it completely, there’s some cuteness to be had– its just that starting out with knitted and felted coasters was a bad editorial decision. Someone should have thought that one through.

I think I’m due for some housekeeping today. My work space tends to turn into a little Wendy-nest full of sheet music, yarn, needles, graph paper, books, doo-dads, and what-nots and a pile of hoodies that end up stacked on the back of my chair. At least until I freakout and tidy every thing up in one fell swoop. I have three hoodies and a cardigan on the back of my chair right now, which is sort of a personal record– since I only own three hoodies.

I feel a feel swoop coming on.

I’ve shocked it in hot water and cold, thwacked, soaked, and snapped the snot out of this yarn so that it’ll be as tough as the hubs of hell.

All the torture has felted and blossomed it just a little, forcing the merino to contract and lock together while the bamboo fibers loosen just slightly and giving it a slightly heathered appearance.

Pardon the extra sheen in this next picture, the yarn isn’t quite dry yet, and my photography skills still need improvement.

Because extruded bamboo fibers are clear (like polar bear fur) when the yarn is completely dry it should look like silk because of the way light reflects through the individual strands (think less like fiber optic cable and more like seeing a crayon through a quartz crystal), but keep most of the insular qualities of merino wool. The drape will be a compromise of the two fibers in the blend.

I probably spend way too much time looking at yarn through my kids’ microscope huh?

I’m saving up for one of those microscopes that I can hookup to the USB on my computer because I’m way too lazy to do sketches and scan them. In case you’re wondering, extruded bamboo fibers look a lot like nylon while bast bamboo fibers are much more interesting (and far less yummy and spinnable) under a microscope because there is a recognizable cellular structure, and when backlit on the slide bleached bamboo bast fibers make pretty rainbows.

Since impulse buying is (part of) what lead to my cluttered life in the first place, that means that staying with Flylady would present way too much resistance. I’m a path of least resistance kinda girl.

I’m not squishy or gooey and don’t fall into purple puddles but the change to my inbox does make me a little sad.

Fortunately I have some gorgeous handpainted bamboo/merino blend roving to console me.

The picture I took came out okay, except the colors are much more vivid in real life.

The yarn when plied is destined to become a Baby Surprise Jacket for Lexi. I know she’s no longer a baby, but it doesn’t take much tweeking to embiggen the pattern to fit a 5 year old.

Doesn’t this look like fluffy shiny deer guts? The effect is far more realistic in real life than I was able to capture with the camera. I thank goodness that the smell is not that of authentic intestines.

One of the things I like about dying silk is that it’s fairly goof proof so long as I give the dye enough time. It can be treated like an animal fiber and put into acid dye, or like a plant fiber and soaked in soda ash. I ended up using scarlet RIT dye (which is a little of each type of dye), warm water and giving it a good three hours soak before pulling it from the dye pot.

I can’t believe how paranoid I was the first few times I handled the stuff and how casual I am with it now.

Spun up it makes a more attractive and much less graphic yarn. It’s almost appropriate for Valentines day.

When I have my second bobbin full I plan to ply it, but it is so tempting to leave some portion as a single to weave in with the flax that is currently languishing on the other wheel.

I generally have the attention span of a hamster, so this progress represents more time than I care to admit investing into it.

Life in Craftopia is getting expensive again: Before the weekend I ordered an Ashford maintenance kit for the traddy, and my husband invested in 3 new bobbins for my Traveler (good man.)

My new winder showed up yesterday, and I’ve had a chance to test it with the swift. And the verdict is good, oh so very good. I was a little worried because I couldn’t find reviews of the inline winders, only the description of “smooth winding action”

It does have smooth winding action, that is absolutely true. It’s very solidly built (my other one came with a broken spindle right out of the box, so this is a definite improvement.) Also there’s no way that my yarn can end up skipping off the spindle and into the gears, I’ll miss that about the old one, because it’s so much fun carefully and slowly reversing the winding and untangling my mangled yarn from those gears. And for some reason, the table clamp actually clamps the darned thing to the table and it stays clamped (the old one would pop off the table.)

So far the major flaw seems to be that it was made by Lacis, also the manufacturer of my missing inferior ball winder, so while I feel justified dissin’ Lacis for producing a shabby winder I can’t do it so completely since the new winder is not so shabby. I can say that if I find the old winder I’m trashing it right away, I was going to give it to the kids for their yarn projects  but that just seems too cruel to do to my own children after using this one. I’ll ante up and lay out the cash on a second one of the in line winders for them, much less frustration involved.

Flax is a bast fiber, which means it’s grown inside a plant and beaten out– the woody parts of the plant dried, retted (rotted) and removed, so that the long cellulose fibers remain. Ramie, nettle and hemp are also bast fibers.

In the story of Rumplestilskin, the millers daughter is locked up in a room full of straw, and she’s expected to spin it into gold. Talk about high pressure; to strik and scutch and hackle all that flax before even thinking about taking it to the wheel. We’ll assume the drying and retting was already for her since it spun to gold we might assume that it was retted in a pond and not dew retted, as dew retting tends to result in a grayish tone and retting in a puddle results in a golden color.

The flax I’m using is bleached Irish line. Line consists of the longer fibers, whereas tow consists of the shorter fibers.

Mine is spun wet to smooth the fibers and help them soften just enough to create a slightly exaggerated memory.

During spinning the flax fibers are quite harsh, and the single is stiff. No worries though, the more abuse linen takes the nicer it becomes. Boiling it with a little soda ash makes it softer and the fibers start to take on a sheen. Most of those little fuzz prickles will break off as well leaving a smooth single behind; making me look like a much more adequate spinner than I actually am.

That man, you know the one; he’s about 6 foot, lean, nice strong features, and wears a wedding ring that matches mine claims to know nothing about the missing ball winder. I think he’s involved with the crime, but he refused to break during the course of interrogation so I was forced to let him go.

The yarn-winder is obviously some place where I have not yet thought to look.

I can’t go on like this so I’ve ordered a new one. A better one. Well, hopefully it’s an upgrade from the old one. The first one was an ordinary table top ball winder that claimed to make 4 oz balls of yarn (average wool yarn was between 3.25-3.75 ounces before the ball exceeded the capacity of the winder) and did a wobbly dancy thing while the yarn guide was stationary. The new one is an inline ball winder, where the yarn guide moves– it also claims to create 4 ounces.

Anyone have any experience with the inline kind? (I know, kinda late to ask since I already ordered it) Amazon claims I’ll see it somewhere between February 6 and 11.