And She Knits Too!

Spinning Yarn, a photo essay

Fibre: Into The Whirled Falkland Top in Grape Ape

Goal: Heavy worsted yarn for fingerless mittens (hopefully subtley striped)

End result: 82 metres of chunky yarn (9wpi).  Fingerless mittens for Emma and enough leftover for a headband/earwarmer.

She loves them and I'm really pleased with how they turned out.

Rhinebeck Report: 2009 Edition

I took almost no photos--only of the end results of our trip.  It was great.  A fine time from my Toronto knit-pals and my internet knit-pals alike.  

The house we rented outside Woodstock was fabulous and spacious.  We ate good food and drank good wine (actually great wine).  

We bought shoes.

 

And yarn.

 

And yarn

And more yarn

And a lot of "protoyarn" aka fibre.

It was good.

My haul: 3 braids from Into the Whirled, 8oz of merino, a sweater's worth of Abundance BFL from Briar Rose, yarn and fibre to make thrummed mitts, a limited edition mug from Jennie The Potter and a niddy noddy.  Not a tonne, but just enough.  All the photos are here on my Flickr page.

Thanks Carol!

I love the internet.  I've met so many interesting people from all around the world through it.  I do a lot of my job on it.  I connect with people I know in real life and those whom I'm only acquainted with virtually and I've made some amazing friendships through it.

When I started spinning, one of my internet friends Carol contacted Lisa Souza, another internet acquaintance (whom I met when I sold advertising for Knitty) and gave me the fantastic gift of a certificate for spinning fibre. Yummy Lisa Souza BFL roving to be exact.

Well, one good turn deserves another, so I made Carol a scarf to say Thank You.  I'm going to meet Carol in person for the first time at Rhinbeck, which didn't give me enough time to spin and then weave some of the fibre she gave me, so I took some of my brown corrie handspun and some Fly ing Sheep BFL for the weft, and some Fleece Artist Merino Sock for the warp and made this lovely scarf.

I went for truly random brown stripes because it was randomness on the internet that led me to meet Carol (well that and I didn't have enough for the whole scarf) and I really hope she loves the jeweled blue-green tones. 

 

I don't know if Carol reads my blog, but to maintain the surprise, I've set this post up to go live after I've left for Rhinebeck.  Thanks for the fibre Carol and for being one of my virtual friends.

Queue the theme from Rocky

Tonight, after a long day in which I discovered that I messed up my data in a way that if it can't be recovered from the network will cost me about a week of work, I had the best run I've probably ever had.

Maybe it was because of the ill-fated data that it felt good, but I may have just had that feeling runners describe. I was in the groove.  I ran well and didn't feel tired.  It was what I wanted to do.  It felt good.

Because of a shin splint and the tumble down the stairs I haven't run for a couple of weeks.  I decided to backtrack to week 6 of the Couch to 5km and so it wasn't like I ran for long or far, but I did run.  And when the Ipod told me to cool down, I ran for a little longer.  I *felt* like I could have run the whole 30 minutes.  And I checked the Gmaps Pedometer--I ran/walked just over 5km!!!

And I'm anxious to run again.  Hopefully my body will send those same vibes tomorrow.

In The Pink!

We're in the good part of the bathroom reno!  Stuff is going back on instead of coming out.  We have electricity, plumbing, a bathtub with a working drain! 

We've also squared off the ceiling, installed a properly vented fan (that involved a big ladder and drilling a hole into our house--wacky) and have managed to shim the walls to be square. 

I will just say Craig is awesome.  I help, but am not the brains or brawn of this job. 

Now we're insulating (our ceiling wasn't insulated before) and drywall is soon to be installed. 

I'm hoping this long weekend we'll do a big push and maybe start tiling around the tub.  We're all getting tired of the disruption and want to see it finished.

Finished Object Catch Up

I finished a few little pieces a while back that I haven't blogged about or even put on Ravelry (do you think Ravelry has been affecting blogging?  I'm saving that for another post--but I'm putting it out there).

First, a scarf I started weaving a while back.

It didn't turn out how I wanted, but it does look great.  The colour does nothing for me, so I gave it to Emma (10 year olds seem to look good in everything, don't they?).  

The yarn is Hempathy and it weaves up so nice.  The yarn blooms and softens with washing making for a nice drapey scarf.

Emma also requested a pointy hat out of some of my early handspun.  Despite her dislike of pink she chose soft merino over some shetland she liked the colour of better and I whipped up this hat a couple of weekends ago.  

It was fun to knit with yarn I made.  I'm already planning a hat for Xander.  It's been nippy in the mornings, so they'll be wearing them soon.