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.

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Note to self: If I *must* own expensive software, I might want to learn how to use it before it is obsolete.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

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.

During our morning errands I grabbed a set of paint brush pen things and a sketch pad for Lexi.

I’m undecided on whether I was an extremely clever or extremely as a mommy. Yes, she is covered with crayola product ink, no it is not on the walls (yet.) Clever or foolish? I may have to review that question next week.

One thing I can say about Lexi’s artistic endeavors is the girl is bold and she likes her colors. I think she should take over picking my fibers and dyeing them for me, what do you think?

I present to you “Abcapoo” a work in progress by Alexanne Meyer.

I haven’t put forth any serious spinning effort in a while, every once in a while I grab my spindle and work on the reddish brown baby alpaca but the wheel has languished in the closet since August.

Opal knows what it takes to get a girl spinning again and put it all in one care package for me. Caramels, warm hats, comfy socks, and of course yummy roving. Thank you Opal!

Not pictured is the HK notepad, the coolest cabled hat ever (I’m not taking it off) or the caramels (because I’ve eaten them and they were yummy) or the gorgeous bracelet (note to self, buy more batteries for camera.)

Aren’t the amigurumi the cutest ever? Lexi loves them so much (according to Lexi they know all the funniest lines from Finding Nemo, it’s rare to find such movie loving crocheted sea dwellers.)

The roving is called Evil Clown, but spun up I think it is more “kind hearted Gypsy princess” than white faced carnie gone bad.

On other fronts I was called an “elitist b*tch” because I commented on how many knitters and spinners had cool blogs. That’s almost as good as last week when I was called a passive agressive control freak, not sure what that was for, or what the writer hoped to accomplish so I’ll go on assuming that the writer of that message had a psychotic break of some sort. This is the best I can do since I’ve given up on the cussing words.

I was offline just after the inauguration (power outage) but I did watch the inauguration ceremony and President Obama’s speech online prior to the outage and I made some notes when it was was clear I wouldn’t be able to comment until the lights came back on.

First and foremost is that I have a dim recollection of the National Lampoon’s “The lost white house tapes” and I half expected, half hoped that there would be a swearing out ceremony for George W. (perhaps Jesse Jackson could have delivered it.) I was rather disappointed that there was no swearing out ceremony.

Second was that the hot phrase on Fox News, was “a peaceful transition of power”– their correspondents must have said “a peaceful transition of power” at least 20 times in the ten minutes that we actually watched the live feed online. So much so that I figured that Fox had gone with the “If you can’t say anything nice, say nothing at all” bit of wisdom.

MSNBC was much better, and still it was a little creepy coverage-wise. There were many comparisons between Obama and Lincoln and Obama and Kennedy. As nice as those comparisons were, I figure it’s not good luck to compare a newly elected president to two presidents who, when all is said and done, are most famous for being assassinated. Don’t jinxy Obama!

(Yes, I am just superstitious enough.)