I started with this:
Then I turned it into this:
And, after washing and drying and a bit of knitting, got a hat.
The natural light shows off the color variations better, but the flash photo looks closer to real life (at least to my eye.)
I didn’t really know what to expect from the fiber in the first place, but I like the way the colors have become subtle under spinning and plying.
I was only a leetle squeaky, but I did find a way to let the person from whom I bought the spindle (the one with the beautiful, yet sadly broken whorl) that it had broken, and this is what came in the mail last week:
I can say this: I will buy more spindles from her etsy shop. She stood by her product and went the extra mile, something that you don’t always find these days. And I’ll also point out that I didn’t even really ask for a replacement whorl, she offered it on her own. I would have been fine if she hadn’t replaced it, since it had been in my possession for several months and presumably was my own fault for breaking, so it’s just icing on the cake that she did replace it. Stellar!
The Beard of Doom
Top Ten Good Things about Having a Beard:
10. My face is warm, pretty much regardless of the winter outside. Plus, I don’t have to worry about most of my face getting sunburned.
9. I become more inscrutable. Hard to see my expression behind all the hair. I should try poker.
8. I spend less time in the shower, since that’s where I usually shave my face.
7. I have something to stroke while I ponder on things.
6. I get to show how manly I am, since Real Men can grow Real Beards.
5. I think I look better with a beard.
4. I tend to scare small children with my beard. Yes, this is a bonus.
3. I’m reaching back to my roots with my facial hair. My British heritage. Also, my Danish heritage.
2. My chin hairs are the canary of grey hairs. And the canary is starting to look a little woozy.
1. I carry food storage with me.
Top Ten Bad Things about Having a Beard:
10. It’s too warm in the summer.
9. I have to explain myself all the time, since people miss the little grin I put on when I’m being silly.
8. I spend WAY more time shampooing my hair in the shower. Pretty much a full-head exercise now.
7. It does itch a bit, although that does tend to go away when the hair gets long enough.
6. The girly-men have taken over fashion since the 80s, so I’m not in style.
5. This is about as good-looking as I get.
4. Sometimes I like to hold babies, but they mostly don’t want me to.
3. The roots of my hair are all over the place. I have to dust my own hairs off my desk daily.
2. I have grey hairs on my chin! Aigh!
1. I carry food storage with me.
I didn’t even drop it from very high… and I was almost done with the singles for that three-ply yarn I’ve been working on. Ah, well, I guess that means it’s time for me to jump into the wishlist. I have now ordered a Bossie (canarywood mini), so we’ll get to see if they’re really little tornadoes. I just wish I already had it in my itchy fingers.
I haven’t been spinning very much lately, because I’ve sort of been focused on getting some socks done, so it’s kind of ironic that I decided to put a couple of hours into finishing up these singles tonight while I was at the yarn store, hanging out with all of the knitters there. I was just about to get up and leave when I dropped the spindle. Argh.
Ah, well. There are worse things which have happened to me for sure. And this sort of forced me (please don’t throw me into the briar patch!) into ordering that Bossie, so I guess this is a good thing from a certain point of view.
It’s just… well, this was my first pretty spindle. I have some sentimental value attached to it just for that, and while I’m fairly sure I could glue it back together, it just won’t be the same. I think I may glue it back together just so I can have it to look at, but I am fairly sure that its spinning days are over.
I would like to obtain some of the following items. I’ll be socking away my pennies in my personal savings account in order to get them.
(1) One or more of the Tsarina’s excellent sock kits.
(2) I’d like to play with a loom. Spunky Eclectic has some interesting table-top looms for just a few bucks.
(3) A Golding spindle. Those ring-weighted spindles look awfully tempting.
(4) A Bosworth spindle. I just love the way these look and I haven’t ever run into a bad review.
I’ll add to this as time goes by, and maybe even I’ll be able to cross things off the list unless I keep spending all of my money on New Fiber:
I had made it nearly 2 months in between fiber purchases. That’s, like, a record or something.
Every now and then I think that I should just carry my camera everywhere with me. Maybe I should. Here are some more of the better images I’ve caught.
Near our camping spot in Goblin Valley.
Near our camping spot at Little Sahara State Park.
From my trip to Cairo.
From my last trip to Oregon.
I was trying to clean up the website, when I found some photos that reminded me that I used to try to take real photographs. Here’s a small sample of some of my still-life/landscapes–and I really must try taking some more of these sometime. I keep seeing a perfect shot from part of Alaric’s paper route, if I’d just remember to take my camera along one of these days…
I’m not the best at looking at fiber and understanding intuitively what a finished object would look like when it’s done. For example, I bought some BFL called “Burning Bush” from Spunky Eclectic which looked like this when I got it.
I don’t know what I expected from this, but I didn’t understand how separate and vibrant these colors would turn out in the singles.
First this:
And then this:
I ended up turning it into a hat for Cambria, since all those pinks made it unsuitable for me to wear. I’m funny like that. And this reminds me that I need to get a photo of the hat, since I don’t have one right now.
My color sense is improving, though. In this yarn, I knew from the beginning that there would be a faux-fair-isle look to part of it, but I had no idea that the banding in the different colors would be so even.
Yes, that’s the infamous k2p2-ribbed sock recipe. It’s a secret, I tell you, so don’t go spreading it around!
And sometimes I know almost exactly how the color is going to work out. The fiber that I started spinning over the holidays (as noted in this post) is working out almost exactly as I had planned.
Here’s a shot showing off my lovely malachite spindle (my dreamspindle):
Here’s one showing how the singles are spinning up. Notice the lovely luster the merino/bamboo blend has.
And here is the ubiquitous penny shot (to give a sense of scale):
I’m feeling much more confident in my ability to spin this stuff up. I might even venture into the carroty silk one day…
But it is nice that I’m starting to have a sense of what the fiber will look like as I work with it. Now we’ll see if the plied yarn and finished objects look anything like the vision I have in my head.
I have been knitting now for about four years, and spinning for a few months. It turns out that nothing is as calming as spinning, and nothing is quite as satisfying as putting on a newly-completed article of clothing that I have just knit. On top of all that, putting on something that I both spun and knit is a treat beyond comparison. I have been spreading that joy a little bit, which was helped when each of the kids indicated to me that they wanted to have spindles for Christmas.
Here is Aurora’s first spinning. She not only spun it up before I could get a picture of her with it, she also knit it up. She’s much faster at knitting than I am. Now we just need to get her some more fiber in this colorway so she can finish her scarf. 
While I was teaching the kids to spin their fiber, I got some out myself for demonstration. This is the fiber I chose:
It’s a 60/40 merino/bamboo blend, and I really like the luster it shows. I have split it into thirds, by weight, so it should work out to turn this into three-ply sock yarn. I have one third of it already spun up, on my Louet spindle, and I need to get the rest done. I’m thinking I’ll use the malachite spindle, since it’s slightly lighter than the Louet (and the lightest spindle I have.) Which reminds me–I must put some money down on a Bosworth mini soon. I’d like a sub-ounce spindle to play with.
In any case, I think that I have discovered that one of the keys to my happiness is how much time I spend working on fiber-related stuff. I have also discovered that it’s far easier to take a spindle into the family room to watch TV and spin with the kids than it is to drag my wheel all over the place. Don’t get me wrong… I love my wheel. But I love my spindles, too, and I’m rediscovering that right now.
Michael Faraday started a tradition of trying to bring science to the masses with his annual Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institution. In 1980, the Chemistry department at the University of Utah decided to continue this fine tradition. Two of the professors from the department dress up in period costumes from the 1860s and lecture on some entertaining properties, such as color in chemistry, the chemistry of a burning candle, and (the best part) some explosions.
Thanks to my wife, who got tickets weeks ago, we went as a family last night to watch this. I think the only one who wasn’t completely entertained was Elenna, who just couldn’t sit still for the whole 75 minutes. Hopefully, this is something my children will remember as something cool their parents did.
It also made me wish I had paid more attention in Chemistry back when I took it–in that very same room.