Wish you were here

I'm startled to see that it has been 8 days since I posted. But, really, if you were here, doing this, would you be thinking about blogging?

My new favourite thing to do, and the number one reason that none of my family's dinners has been on time for, like, days.

There's something so satisfying about the whickering wheel, wind in the trees behind my house, and industrious birdsong all mingling together into a contented, busy euphony. I could spend whole days here.

Yesterday a butterfly came to rest on one maiden as I was spinning. It was only there for a second before it wafted away.

The weekends are full of my neighbours' power tools and top-forty radios, but Monday through Friday, after all their cars have charged off for work and daycare, the birds and the wheel and I make a gentler music for my neighbourhood.

QLD

I just bought these two pattern books at Denise's NeedleWorks. There ought to be some kind of rule about late-night online purchasing, like in Gremlins: don't feed your stash after midnight or it'll take over your house. Where's a wise old Chinese gentleman when you need one, like when you're logging on to PayPal?


But I've been wanting these books for a long time, so it's not really an impulse-buy - more a well-considered investment.


Book One:

and Book Two:

They're for me, of course, but one or two Christmas presents might be made from them...maybe. I've got two pressies done already - y'know, we're more than halfway to Yule. (Kate, are you going to smack me for that, the next time I see you?)

Great and Powerful Oz

My friend emailed me today with a cautious inquiry as to my health...apparently I've been a little too silent.

Definitely the blog has suffered, the last few months, from a lack of action on my part. Especially the crafty stuff - it's not that I haven't been doing it, I just haven't been telling you about it.

Knitting

My feet have been cold lately, so I finished a pair of "Grown-up Booties" from Ysolda's book "Whimsical Little Knits". Well, I've finished one, and the second one is half done. I am going to be about 5 grams short of yarn, so I'll pick up some more from the Farmer's Market on Sunday.

The yarn is from a flock of Border Cheviot, locally grown for wool and meat. They are raised about 25 minutes from here, and processed in a cool little mill in Alberta. The colour is natural - no bleaching or dyeing. It's a heavy aran weight.

Spinning

I've finished the first skein of Shetland yarn from Aiden's flock. My long-term goal for this wool is to create a fair-isle palette of natural colours, blending the wool on the carders to make the various shades. I started with the natural grey, which started out as a three-colour fleece - the tips are warm, light brown, the middle of the lock is cool grey, and there is white next to the skin. Sadly, of course, the colour gradations are lost in the carding, but in the skein all three colours are present, giving the finished yarn depth and complexity that a single colour wouldn't have.

This is my first long-draw skein. Things get a little uneven in places but I love the overall effect - not to mention the incredibly fast process. The skein is a heavy-fingering/sport-weight 2-ply - I haven't done the wraps per inch nor the yardage yet.

I had a half-bobbin of singles left over -with this much raw fleece, I am not worried about making the singles ply out evenly. I just fill two bobbins more or less, and ply away. The process is interesting. I've developed a contemplative, long-range view for this project, due to the sheer size of it. You can't expect to have all the fleece washed in one day, and you can only spin as much as you've carded, and you can only ply as much as you've got bobbin-space for...I like it. It's impossible to hurry. I've done as much plying as I have singles, and I've spun all the rolags I've carded, so now it's time to card again.

This week is for carding, then, and next week I'll be able to spin some more singles. Once I've got another 100 grams or so of the natural grey, I'll start carding some white and grey together for blended rolags to spin an intermediate shade.

I took some garden pictures to show you, but a baffling 'internal error' has stymied me. Blogger is vague as to whether the error is internal to them, or internal to me. Perhaps next time.

Putting Paid

Oh Buffy, thank you. THANK YOU.

WATCH BUFFY DEAL WITH EDWARD.

I tried to embed this, but the blogger format cut off the entire right side of the scene. Watch it though - it's so worth it, even if you haven't seen either show.

Swiffed.

If I showed you a picture of the bottoms of my feet, you'd know what we needed the Swiffer for. Public hall floors are disgusting.

People had cameras, so you might get to see a photo if any of them turn out (doubtful - it's hard to take good photos of dancers) but I took one self portrait for the blog header anyway, to give you a teeny glimpse.

It was a great night - lots of dancers in the audience, which is always energizing. Thanks, everybody who showed up - Rona, Brenda, Alison, Kate and her mum, my friends Sandy Leanne Teralee Renee AND my lovely mother - it was great to have you there, girlies.

We're finished for the year now - this was our last show - but as usual, post-performance, I'm buzzing and can't go to sleep. So I'm going to watch some Buffy and drink another Stella Artois...party time!

A22

My list for today:

BUY:
false eyelashes + adhesive
fake piercings
safety pins
large red faux flower + hairpin

PACK:
Swiffer
clothing adhesive/double-faced tape
stick-on rhinestones
beaded fringe
Witch Hazel
ankle bells
outfit X 4
Rescue Remedy

Three guesses what I'm doing tonight.

Twitterty-Gibbet

I'm a bit conflicted about Twitter. It seems like unalloyed narcissism. But then, I've been giving it a try for the last week or two and I've noticed that it comes in handy for odd one-liners that I might have turned into blog posts but which really don't deserve that much air time.

So in that way it's potentially useful, provided one doesn't become unhealthily obsessed with apprising the internet of their every eye-twitch.

There's a per-tweet entry limit of about 140 characters (160?) and I often wonder how this will affect the next generation of upper-academia: how much do you want to bet some first-year university student will some day print off a week's worth of tweets and submit it as her writing assignment? God help us all.