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Welcome
I'm Laura. I am female, 27, a codemonkey, a linux enthusiast, a gamer, a bookworm, a knitter, gothic, musical, pagan, vehemently geeky and occasionally ineptly artistic.
Hi!
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Battling a nasty case of Startitis
Posted at 02 Sep 2010 08:03:58 AM |
I'm trying to make my packing list for our trip to New York this weekend, and for various reasons it seems like all of my knitting WIPs and all of my spinning projects won't work. Metal needles, not mindless enough, too big to fit in the suitcase*, spindle is too pointy; you name it, the TSA would object to it.
I'm looking over my stash page on Ravelry (which, if you haven't personally witnessed it, is fairly ridiculous) and all I can think is "I can't believe I have nothing to knit!"
Great. My stash has become my clothes closet.
* I have not yet achieved the level of obsession which leads me to pack less clothes in favor of using the space for knitting.**
** But I've thought about it.
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I'm not dead yet
Posted at 22 Aug 2010 11:56:03 AM |
I'm not dead, I promise. I may have dropped off of Facebook and my AIM presence is sporadic, but I'm still here - knitting, spinning and occasionally getting out of the house.
More of the latter than the former, it seems. We sweated last weekend while watching the Cards soundly beat the Cubs, and yesterday I went along with D while his bike group went on a half-day ride around St Louis and some of the state parks to the south. (Note to weather: stop being hot. Please?)
Next weekend we'll be in Iowa, and the weekend after that in New York. I think it slows down after that.. but don't quote me.
Despite my newly-renewed resolution to experience more than what I can see from my computer chair, I've actually gotten quite a bit done. It didn't feel like much at the time, but when gathered up like this I look rather productive:
( Click for the rest )
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FO: Handspun suri alpaca/merino
Posted at 24 Jul 2010 06:52:24 PM |
I haz a proud.
70% Suri Alpaca/30% Merino from Surina, purchased at MDSW
4oz
Spindle-spun and chain plied
222 yards, about 14 wpi after washing and thwacking.
Tour de Fleece 2010: Victory.
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The funny thing
Posted at 18 Jul 2010 01:36:02 PM |
The funny thing about spinning is that it seems to make me a better knitter (or crocheter, as the case may be, but it often isn't).
To wit: When I first re-started knitting, I scorned the idea of swatching. "Hah!" I said. "Swatching takes too much time. It can't turn out too badly!"
Then, I learned about garment fitting, gauge, math and How To Make Your Knitting Exactly What You Want. See also: baggy socks. And then I was almost afraid to not swatch ...but I still didn't wash the swatch.
And then I started spinning. With that came (rudimentary) knowledge of singles twist, plying twist, active twist, relaxed twist, what happens when you weight your yarn after washing versus not weighing it, and all the odd things that can happen to a perfectly nice-looking skein of yarn once it hits good old H 20. Armed with better information than multiple forum posts of the "because I said so" type, I'm now afraid to not wash the swatch!
And you know, it's interesting to pick up knowledge this way: in stripes, or layers. Drawing purely from my own experience, when you only knit, you think "yay, yarn!" and you'll probably recognize that there's a difference between wool and not-wool. But unless you're very observant and your yarn purveyors label their wares extremely well, you might not see a difference between the different breeds of sheep/goat/camelids/etc, different plying methods and different amounts of twist. With that comes the realization that the yarn you're holding, even though it's clearly a three-ply fingering weight with 60 stitch color repeats, it is going to be make lousy socks that wear thorough at the heels in a matter of weeks.
Even though I'm very very new to this whole spinning thing, it now seems not at all implausible to have entire conversations about staple length, breeding conditions, shearing methods and how-was-it-prepped? Heavens only know what will happen to me once I discover spinning from locks, prepping my own fiber and whole entire fleeces. See also: spinning wheel.
All of this is also a very slippery slope toward sheep herding, but let's not mention that for the time being.
(D, don't fret. The shepherding thing (while picturesque) is is very unlikely, given that one of the things I like best about all this activity is that I don't have to go outside where it's hot. I sort of doubt that sheep would enjoy existing in the living room...)
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Tour de Fleece, day 11, and FO: The Math Hat
Posted at 13 Jul 2010 08:17:09 PM |
Bob Sheppard, the only Voice of Yankees baseball I can remember, passed away on July 11th.
George Steinbrenner passed away today of a heart attack.
Needless to say, this is not a good week for Yankees baseball. They both contributed so much to the team and to the sport, and will sorely be missed. RIP, boys.
In happier news, I've hit the halfway mark on my Tour de Fleece spinning. I may have said earlier that it was 2oz of alpaca/merino; wrong. It's 4oz in total. The 2oz I've spun are already more than I've done in a month before (wheel spinners out there, stop laughing; I like my spindles!) and I'm happy with the singles thus far. They'll be chain plied (another new skill) as I couldn't be arsed to divide the pencil roving into 3 even piles beforehand.
Lest my stash get too small (I thought I said stop laughing!) I used a Groupie credit at The Loopy Ewe to buy a lovely 4.9 oz braid of Polwarth roving in Subdued Rainbow. I'm hoping to spin it up in laceweight looooooong color repeats, either divided for 2ply or chain plied.
I also picked up the yarn for the start of the knit and knag World Heritage KAL this fall, not because I have any hopes of starting on time, but because Jen the dyer has a 15% off sale running right now and I've been curious about the yarn since seeing it pop up in the Blocking thread on Rav. The yarn, lest I forget to tell you, is Nightfall from FibroFibers.
My knitting doesn't have much to show for itself lately, since my attentions are entirely focused on a secret project or two, neither of which will see the glowing light of your monitors until the end of the year. Rest assured, it's not just stash acquisition going on around here.
Oh! I nearly forgot.
Here: have a hat. I finished it last night (and hopefully it fits the recipient. It's certainly huge on me, which is a good sign). The goal was to have the grey stripes decrease at the same rate that the blue ones increased, while still ending up with a hat of a specified height.
This involved Math. Evil, evil math. I think this is Hat Mark 3. Hat Mark 3.5 if you count my first disastrous 150 stitch cast on...but I don't.
Pattern: my own, but the specifics are on Rav
Yarn: Berroco Lustra
Needles: US 4 for the ribbing, US 5 for the body.
I still have comment logging turned on, and I sincerely apologize if my website eats your comment or decides that you are spam. I'm trying to reproduce the problem so that I actually have some legit non-spam logs to look at, and hopefully fix this once and for all!
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So I built myself a lightbox.
Posted at 02 Jul 2010 12:55:18 PM |
So I built myself a lightbox.
I have to crop things a bit oddly still, since what I'm using as a posterboard backdrop is about an inch and a half less wide than the box is- so if I'm not careful you can see cardboard in the background.
That can be rectified the next time I go to Hobby Lobby or Michael's, though.
I think I like it!
I put in some work on the sleeve of my Twist Cardigan, too. (You thought I'd forgotten about it, didn't you? Nice try!)
There's a mistake in there. I know where it is. No need to tell me.
In other news, the Tour de Fleece starts on Saturday. We won't be here, as there's a family reunion that day, but I'm not too worried. My goal is to suck less at the suri alpaca mentioned a few posts down, and since I want a worsted or aran 3-ply I think I'll be able to spin it up in a month. I did some training with a 2-ply mini skein just to see how it would behave after washing and thwacking; it fluffs up some, but not too badly. It's doable (as long as I don't get distracted by the Blue Morpho batt... ;) )
In other-other news, I'm still wrassling (technical term) with the comments system. I don't know why it's flagging perfectly good comments as spam, and I apologize to anyone it's kicked out! I have some more logging in now, so hopefully we can get to the bottom of this.
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You know...
Posted at 02 Jul 2010 05:27:07 PM |
You know...
There may be better ways to relax and improve on a crappy day...
But I really can't think of a one.
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Comments are fixed
Posted at 26 Jun 2010 10:39:00 AM |
I am reasonably sure that comments are working properly now.
As to why the site doesn't display properly formatted in Safari on the iPad (and presumably iPhone), I don't know, but it's not serious enough for me to want to find out why Safari doesn't like <center> tags.
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My spindling fingers are tired
Posted at 26 Jun 2010 10:46:16 AM |
It's alright Mollie, I wasn't using that anyway.
Today was a great day in fiber-acquisition land! And some of it I didn't even have to pay for (swaps are the greatest thing since sliced bread, I swear. New toys, and it's all "free")!
First was this amazing 3oz batt of merino and bamboo from Butterfly Girl Designs. I've been coveting this for awhile, and a swap with a lovely Ravelry user got it for me!
And then we have 4oz of not quite as high-grade but still merino from Malinablue, which is all sorts of amazing colors:
Then Dan and I went wandering in Old Town St Charles this afternoon because one of the spice shops up there, Figuero's, is apparently a local source for Sticky Pig BBQ Sauce! (A bonus in itself.) Two blocks down from that shop is Knit and Caboodle, a lovely LYS which used to have some very pretty natural-colored Suri Alpaca :)
In conclusion... I will be ever so slightly busy if I want to have a prayer of getting through all of this ;)
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Surprise!
Posted at 24 Jun 2010 07:54:03 AM |
Yestereday I started work on a secret project. It's rather unlikely that the recipient will ever read this, so I'm not worried about sharing it with those of you who do. I need a very specific amount of very nice yarn.
It's given me an excuse to break into the alpaca/silk from Gale's Art that I bought at MDSW, too. A few mis-spins have gotten me a bit farther into it than I'd planned, actually ;).
Note to self: you have no idea how to judge yardage. None.
On the plus side, after I 2-plyed what I spun last night, the resulting yarn was perfectly balanced. No kinks, nothing. Go me! Since I felt bad about throwing out 3 yards of perfectly good yarn, this morning I braided it. No idea what I'll do with it... Maybe put jewelry clasps on the ends and call it a bracelet.
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