Totally worth it!

I've been doing a lot more spinning lately. While the several tons of fiber I've accumulated over the years does provide a nice amount of insulation, it's been taking up space. Without turning into yarn. In spite of my best efforts, no amount of wishful thinking makes roving spontaneously metamorphose into yarn.
Apparently, I forgot about the most important step of the process to change the fiber from nice fluffy batts of wool to yarn I can knit with. Spinning!
Carol is walking (when she feels like it) and crawling all over the place. Now that she's fully mobile, I'm trying to train her to ignore the spinning wheel. She'd have to try hard to injure herself with it, but she's a clever lass. I'm certain she'll figure out a way.
So every time she touches the spinning wheel, whether it's in motion or not, I slap her hand and say "no touching the spinning wheel!"
As I was spinning some silk today, the drive band kept falling off the wheel. Carol, of course, tried to "help" me fix it. After that, when I didn't notice that she had been playing with the wheel, she got my attention and did it again. She spun the wheel, and dutifully held out her hand to me for a disciplinary smack. I could almost see the gears turning in her baby head.
"I want to play with the beautiful spinning thingy, but every time I touch it, Mama smacks my hand away. But if that's the price of playing with it I think I can live with it. Maybe I should make this process as easy for Mama as possible--just smack my hand so I can get back to playing with it!"

Spinning report

I've been spinning up some local wool from Hungry Hill Farm. The proprietress has such an amazing color sense! Colors I wouldn't dream of combining--sage green, ochre, flaming crimson--go into her carder and come out in a riotous Mardi Gras of fiber. It's like happiness in a batt. Not the exhuberant manic intensity of Loop batts, but more like the solid comfort of Mexican hot chocolate. It's wonderful and warm with a surprising bite that keeps you interested.
I'm making a S-twist fingering weight single out of it, which I plan to "menace" slightly to make it more stable. I've never tried this particular spinning technique before, so it's interesting to see what happens.

Crazyness in Mackeyland

It's been a while since I posted last. I'd claim it's because I've been busy, but there's always the chance that I'm just too distracted to type.

This month, the only other nurse at my work quit abruptly, leaving me to cover three clinics. They got a temporary nurse to help out for two days a week; as she's the woman who held this position before me, I'm confident that she's really good at the job. The bosses say that they're trying to fill the empty position as soon as possible, but given the reality of government budget cycles, it will probably be at least three or four months before they hire someone.

And then just as all the turnover and schedule changes were happening at work last week, our family got food poisoning. If you want to lose a couple of pant sizes, there's nothing like some spectacular gastrointestinal distress and no solid food for 60 or so hours to make it happen!

In the midst of all this chaos, however, I have found time for yarn. I may be spinning it instead of knitting with it, but yarn is yarn, right? The first few pictures are of my most recent dyeing escapade. I originally tried to dye the wool less saturated shades of pink, blue and grass green, but the dye struck much faster than I'd anticipated. I sorted the wool by color and intensity and then handcarded it. Then I laid out all the batts in order of color progression.

I'm about two thirds of the way through spinning it up, and I really like the way the color slowly transitions from green to brown to burgundy.

I also bought wool from a local vendor, Hungry Hill Farm, and intentionally tried to spin a big fluffy single on the wheel with a Z-twist.

I used my left hand as my dominant hand, as well as the modified short draw I always use. (My wheel has only one ratio, so that limits what I can do with it.) Making up skeins was more difficult than usual. As the niddy-noddy has broken, I used the baby gate instead.

I didn't quite acheive the lofty bulky-weight single I was hoping for, but it made a nice bulky 2-ply!

Jewelery is fun

I'm not really a "girly-girl." I do have two X chromosomes, a nice figure, and enjoy makeup. That's where many of the similarities end. In high school, when all of my friends were busy stalking Justin Timberlake, I had my bedroom wallpapered with the Spokane Chiefs' newspaper clippings. The only adolescent hero-worshiping crush I've ever had was on Barry Marshall, which shows you that I was a massive science geek even then. Now that the Olympics hockey is in full swing, I'm glued to the Internet every evening.

Because Mother Nature has a sick and twisted sense of humor, this does not seem to be the case for the Mimi. The first time we put her into a dress when we were near a full-length mirror, she ran over to the mirror to twirl around and admire herself. Many toddlers disassemble their link-a-dink toys, but she's the only one I know of who wears them as bangle bracelets!

So it's no surprise that her first multi-syllable word is "Jewelery." She likes to climb in my lap, pat my earrings, and say "jewelery, yeah!" with a blissful expression.

As I'm sure many spinners do, I've got a fiber stash of odds and ends that's too small to "do something" with, but I'm reluctant to throw out. You know what I mean: the half ounce of alpaca from my first wash/dye/card experience, 15 grams of recyled silk fibers, half yards of handspun yarn, etc. So I thought I'd card it all together and make some fun batts with them.

Midway through this process, I discovered the hard way that as much as I might like to pretend, large flat hairbrushes are NOT the same thing as proper hand cards. But except for the blisters, I'm pretty pleased with the final results. Carding all the fibers together really evened out a lot of the more vibrant colors, but also brightened up the sedate ones. (After I borrow Pop's hand cards,) I have to try this again!

Finished the sweater!

I finished the Sonnet cardigan!

Spinning update

Ever since I got my wheel, I've been trying to figure out how to make the yarn I want, instead of the yarn it wants to make.

I had some odd bits of superwash left over from making crazy batts. Not enough individually to do anything with, but collectively I had about four ounces. So I divided each color into three equal piles and put each pile into a sandwich baggie.

Pulling random colors of roving from the bag, I spun each bag onto a bobbin,

and then plied them all together as a 3-ply sock yarn. Unfortunately, plying with the wheel doesn't allow me to put as much twist into it as I do with a spindle, so the final yarn may not be suitable for socks.
I'm not sure what my total yardage was because it wouldn't all fit on my niddy-noddy. (Arguably a very good problem to have!)

I also had a bump of roving I hand-dyed either in San Francisco or shortly after we moved from there. (It's been a bit since I went on an all-out dyeing binge!)

Wanting to make mostly-identical socks, I split the roving lenghtwise, spun half on a drop spindle, and Navajo-plied the yarn to keep the color sequences intact. I've still got the other half to spin up, but I hope the yardage will equal the previous skein.

Worlds bestest husband!

I've wanted to go to the Sock Summit ever since the Yarn Harlot sent out the inital post about it. Unfortunately, the budget wouldn't allow for that this year. But it was only two bucks a person to get into the Marketplace, where Brian selflessly minded the Mimi while I wandered around in a fiber-haze.

It was total sensory overload! So much to see, so many wonderful yarns and fibers to pat. So many things calling "take me home with you!" Only the knowledge that our budget is very limited kept me from draining the checking account right then and there.


The Mimi likes people. Doesn't matter, who or where, she likes people. Needless to say, she had fun meeting a lot of new people Saturday.


I love batts and "sparklies." There's just something about the smoothness of the various fibers combined with the fact that I'm simple-minded enough to be amused by not knowing which color will come up next that makes them incredibly mesmerizing to spin. Unfortunately, angora fiber gives me a rash--and almost every custom batt I saw contained it in some percentage. And nothing takes the joy out of spinning or knitting something like getting an itchy rash from it. That's why even the most bored and financially insolvent spinner feels no need to spin fiberglass insulation.

So I was incredibly excited to find this superwash/angelina/recycled silk batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm. Sparkly and angora-free! (And when I showed it to Brian at their booth, he said, "Why do you think I was at their booth? I wanted to make sure you noticed it.")

I found that with enough patience, my wheel will do laceweight. I love this fiber, and I'm having so much fun spinning it that I want to get the most possible "mileage" out of it. I bought 8 ouncess, so I'm envisioning a glittery shawl. (Or I could do a laceweight February Lady sweater, but that's been done by so many people at this point that it's become the knitting equivalent of shopping at the Gap. While I'm busy conforming to everyone else's ideas of cute and beautiful, I might as well go plaster my car with Hello Kitty stickers and paint it pink. )

The colors turned out a lot more subtle in the yarn than they are in the batt. Brian was pleasantly surprised by this. After six years of marriage, it's still a mystery to me how two people with such completely different tastes in fashion and color can live together happily most of the time. He loves earthtones, blues, grays, greens. If the color occurs in nature, he likes it. And while it's not as bad as the proverbial "blind showgirl on an acid trip," there's no denying that I prefer the more saturated end of the color spectrum.

Although my attempts to replace my current drive band (which is several yards of doubled, highly twisted sock yarn) with flexible aquarium tubing didn't work, the wheel spins like a dream. It only has one ratio, but is very sturdy. I can transport it in the car to and from Monday morning spinning without having to disassemble it.

Can't sleep

Not like this title is a surprise to anyone, right? At this point, between working nights and new antidepressants and the nasty cold that's been going around our family, I might as well buy a glittery lavender cape and change my name to "Insomnia Queen."

So time to list some major blessings that have happened recently:

Grandma got out of the hospital about three weeks ago. Last I heard, she is back to her normal self, including playing the harmonica.

I passed my six month employee evaluation at the hospital with flying colors! After the lousy experience I had working at Mills-Peninsula, it was very nice to have my supervisors tell me that they thought I was a good nurse and were pleased with my performance. Incredibly affirming!

I have a spinning wheel! (As always, I'm too lazy to get up and snap a picture of it. ) Brian's parents got me one for my birthday next week. It's a Clemes & Clemes modern style-spinning wheel. Mostly indestructible (always a plus with the Mimi around) and works like a dream.

Night off

I have tonight off work, and my sister in law Meegan was crazy enough--I mean kind enough--to watch the Mimi overnight tonight. Brian will be out at a meeting until late tonight, so a traditional date night is slightly out of the question. I'm thinking I'll bake some cookies, watch random things on Netflix, and spin more yarn. Currently I'm trying to spin enough lace weight yarn for a cardigan. 600 yards down, much more to go!

In other news, I joined Ravelry, but have no idea what to do there. Any tips?

Blessings

It's been a lousy month. We were blind-sided by church politics and will be moving soon. So while we're trying to sort out where we're moving (The front-runner is Corvallis, Oregon because it's close enough to Brian's family that we can hang out with them yet far enough away that we have a bit of distance.) I'm making a list of blessings.

A lot of people at the church have gone out of their way to show support for Brian. And perhaps responding to my "denial is bliss" approach to church politics, most of the church members haven't changed how they treat me or Shirley.

Dad's doing better and at a rehab hospital.

I don't have to work at [Fill in the Blank] hospital! Ever since the day when I had a 78 year old man who'd had his gallbladder out and he was my healthiest patient, I knew that my current job was leading to nursing burnout. (Out of any given five patients on my floor, at least one will be on hemodialysis, three will be diabetic, two will be incontinent, four will be obese, and all of them will be so weak that they can't walk safely unassisted.) Since the last move demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that working until just before the move is not conducive to sanity, I gave my two weeks notice two weeks ago. While I've got a lot of boxes to pack, not having to go spend ten hours a day at a job that makes me feel like a failure at nursing is a huge blessing.

The RNs at [Fill in the Blank] hospital have a contract! After two strikes, fifteen months without a union contract and God only knows how many ineffective negotiations between the administration and the union, [Name of Corporation], the California Nurses Association and the hospital have come up with a new contract that they both can live with. (Because irony is a cruel mistress, the announcement that they'd reached an agreement came the exact day I turned in my letter of resignation.)

I received a new box of wool! Carol over at the Sheep Shed Studio offers a pound of mixed-color Cotswold locks for $12.50! I used my mad money to buy a couple of pounds, sorted the colors according to the color wheel, and have been spinning my way through the red-orange-yellow locks. (I still have a bag of pink-purple-blue-and blue-green-yellow to process.) It's pretty much endless entertainment for twenty five dollars.

At first, the locks look like this:

Then I beat the locks with a flick carder to open them up and remove the bits of vegetable matter. (Apparently sheep hang out in places where there's grass. Who knew?)

I spin serendipitously, grabbing small handfuls of each color out of the box. Then I ply it with itself. The final yarn looks like this:

I have no idea how much I'm going to end up with for a final product. So far I've got about 250 yards and about half the box left. Should be enough for a hat and mittens or something like that.

The Mimi has figured out how to put large objects reliably in her mouth. While this means that we have to keep her in the play pen (another huge blessing, as Jim just gave it to us) while we're packing, it also means that she's growing more able to amuse herself without someone holding her.

stuff in the mail!

Two weeks ago, as I was in mid-whine about cramps and periods and "why don't heating pads have a setting hotter than high?" I received a lovely prize package from Barbara.

Not only did she send me a Baby Surprise Jacket kit, but also a (signed!) copy of one of her books. It didn't make the cramps go away, but it really helped with the whining.

As promised, here is a picture of the finished Tour de Fleece silk: (Yes, I realize that it is wound around a picture frame. One of these days I'll get around to making/buying a niddy-noddy, but this works fine for now.) 215 yards of silk, now wound on a bobbin (known as a toilet paper roll in other households) awaiting something to ply it with.

On Thursday, we were awakened by the Screaming Mimi. Some time between her 0615 feeding and sunlight hitting the living room, she had managed to kick off all of her covers. After waking up cold and with a full diaper, she announced her displeasure to the world. Brian changed her, and handed me the 13 pound ice pack to warm up.

She cheered up promptly, but this is what I look like without caffeine.

In other news, the neighbors had a yard sale last month. And for under ten dollars, I managed to pick up an eight quart enamel stockpot, and a 12 quart one. With lids! I'm going to use them for dying fiber, (hooray for non-reactive cookware!) but they do a good job of amusing Mimi as well.

Tour de Fleece

Le Tour de Fleece begins today.

And while I'd like to do something outrageous like spin 1200 yards of the amazing cashmere/silk Brian gave me for Christmas, I don't have the luxury of taking three weeks off to do nothing but spinning.

So I'm setting somewhat more (hopefully) manageable goals.

1) Spin at least 200 yards of silk

to use as a reinforcing ply for when I get around to using this

superwash wool to make sock yarn.

2) Spin something every day, even if it's just 5 yards.

Sleep on Shirley, sleep on!

Contractions hurt!

Everyone who reads my blog title and has children is no doubt laughing their heads off right now at my grasp of the obvious. (If I were a superhero, I'd be "Mistress of the Obvious." I'm not sure if I'd have a cape or just wear a sparkly leotard. Perhaps both.)

I started having contractions at work yesterday. I was able to finish my shift without too much problems, but have you ever considered how awkward it is to call the obstetrician on your lunch break while you're surrounded by nurses? However, I did get more offers of help the second half of my shift, as well as some very interesting tips on how to tell the difference between false labor and real labor.

"When you go home, put up your feet and have a couple of glasses of wine," one of the most experienced nurses advised. "If the contractions stop after that, it's not real labor."

"Brooke, I don't drink," I replied.

"Oh, then make sure you buy the good stuff, not some rotgut." (Methinks Brooke and I had a bit of a failure to communicate...)

So when I went home, had put my feet up, eaten something, had a nice drink (of herbal tea) and was still having contractions every twelve minutes, I knew it was time to call the doc again. (At this point, I didn't care if it was "real labor" or "false labor." I just knew that I'd exhausted my bag of tricks for making them stop and it was time for professional help.)

He told me to go to the labor and delivery floor's triage to get checked out. They slapped a monitor on me, and told me that both I and Shirley were fine, but yes, those were contractions. Then they gave me some drugs to stop the contractions, told me to call the doc again this morning, and sent me home. Total time in MPHS' L&D: one hour, 45 minutes. Those gals are efficient!

I spent most of today resting and trying to ignore the periodic random contractions that were still happening every hour or so, but was strangely comforted by the fact that Shirley did her regular dance routine as though nothing out of the ordinary was happening.

So tomorrow I get to see the doc/nurse practitioner/somebody who can deliver babies and have more tests run before I find out if/when I can go back to work. I'd planned to work until 38 weeks, but we'll see what happens. If I have to go on maternity leave early, at least I'll get lots of spinning and knitting done.

Brian spoiled me rotten for Christmas. Let's see.. the brown bag is baby camel roving, the yellow bags are buffalo roving, the one with the pink label is 50/50 Mongolian cashmere and mulberry silk, and the little white baggies are yak. I've no idea what I'm going to make with any of it, but I'm sure I'll have lots of fun.

Projects that lead to insanity

Every so often, I'm overcome with guilt for not making this blog more about knitting. After all, if it's titled "Naomi Knits," maybe it should have some yarn-related content. Maybe I shouldn't use it as a soapbox for whatever thoughts are bouncing through my head. Perhaps I need to confine my topic to knitting, or even just continue with my usual slavish imitation of Stephanie Pearl-McPhee. Then again, it's my blog and I'll write about whatever I feel like writing about.

The last several weeks have been very busy for me. There's a new staffing grid at work. The upside of this is that there are more nurses on night shift, and every so often I get to eat lunch during work. (Thank God for Pepsi, or I'd probably collapse from hypoglycemia!) The downside of this is that now the staffing office calls me much more regularly on my nights off to beg me to come in and work extra shifts.

Consequently, I have a backlog of projects that I've photographed over the last few weeks and have yet to show off.

To begin with, I love stuffed animals. When I found an adorable pattern for miniature teddy bears in a knitting book, I was unable to resist the pull of its cuteness. (Yes, that is a US quarter in the picture next to it.) Next, I realized that the bear needed clothes and crocheted it an outfit. Lastly, I shipped it off to my mother-in-law, who has made dollhouse miniatures for years and therefore was truly able to appreciate the insanity that this project represented. (Total time: 20 hours= one half pair of socks.)

When I'm not knitting, I've been working on dyeing. I've been dyeing yarn with Kool-Aid and food coloring for about a year now, but lately I've progressed to dyeing roving. Ever since I blew all my Christmas money at the Wool Peddler on superwash wool roving, I have been experimenting to see precisely what happens when you dye roving with my usual methods.

And here is the single I spun from it:

And here are the socks I am knitting for myself:

I'm not sure how much time I have spent on this particular project, but so far the total is at least 45 hours, and I only have the cuff of the first sock done. I don't suffer from insanity--I enjoy every minute of it.

Socks that lead to insanity

I finally finished Jessica's socks.



The picture doesn't show it off particularly well, but in addition to the 5-rib cable running down both sides of the cuff, I ran a 2x2 cable down either side of the instep. When I got to the toe, I had yet another lapse of sanity, and managed to coordinate my decreases so the cable continues and becomes partof the toe shaping.

They took five weeks, which makes them the second-hardest pair of socks I've ever designed and knit. The grand prize winner in the "Nomi Went Nuts While Knitting" competition is this pair of socks:



(it does have a mate, I'm just too lazy to get up and take a picture of them together.)


They were my 2005 Christmas gift to myself (and I seem to recall someone asking if I could do cables that were two-colored...) and like many other small good things, they took nine months to complete. I started them in December 2005, and I finished them in September 2006 as I visited my brother in the hospital.

And what am I doing now? I'm working on a pair of socks in a self-striping yarn that I hand-spun from superwash roving.


They say that admitting you have a problem is the first step...

A tale of two spindles

Last week, I received a package. A very nice package, from Brian's little sister Jessica. (Here is a picture of Jessica at our wedding reception a few years back. Note the intent expressions as her then-fiancee (now husband) and Brian's brother Brad send out the traditional "she is very important to me and if you hurt her, I will beat you to a bloody pulp" manly signals. Also note Jessica's amused expression at this process.)

Jessica had told me that she has an un-wanted drop-spindle at home, and was more than willing to arange a trade with me. (I also acquired a very similar one from Becka two weeks ago, but that's a story for another day. ) So we aranged that I would knit her socks in her size and color (I'm 3/4 of the way done!) and she'd send me the spindle.

She definitely sent me the spindle, alright. And five gallon Ziplock bags filled with fiber to ease the learning how to spin process. And a book on how to spin! (The socks are by far one of the most complex designs I've ever created, but I definitely got the better end of the bargain.)

My nocturnal work schedule means that on my nights off, I wake up at about 3:30am and can't get back to sleep until around six. And while I can't get back to sleep, I'm also too sleepy to knit. But apparently my body/brain can handle spinning with a drop spindle, so I've decided to embrace this time as "my spinning time." (Because as we all know, it's much kinder to Brian for me to get up and do something and let him sleep in peace than lay there saying "I can't sleep... Can you sleep?")

Here is the spindle, loaded up with a fingering weight single spun out of acrylic. (If you ever run out of money for spinning fiber, Lion Brand's Homespun yarn is basically acrylic roving plied with two strands of sewing thread for stability. Ponder this.)
Some of you might wonder "Who sent you this particular spindle?"

And the answer is: "It's four am, you should be pleased I remember my own name at this point!" (I should probably post pictures of both spindles, as they are loaded with sport-weight gray and white yarn, but I'm really just too lazy to get the camera out right now.)

I'm delighted to have both of them, because I haven't really figured out Navajo plying and having two spindles makes making two-ply yarn much easier.

So, thank you Jessica, and thank you Becka, because you have both made my insomniac holiday season much more enjoyable!