A weekend full of activity

Etsy shop: I made new ads (which run on Ravelry). A new design uses a pretty good photo of a pink/peach skein of my handspun yarn. I added "handspun yarns & hand-dyed fiber" on the two existing ads with the blue sky and sheep. I'm wondering if this change will help people know what the ads are FOR and encourage them to click on them. As it is there has been VERY LOW SUCCESS with these ads so far.

I also listed the four 4-oz bumps of roving I already dyed last week, and the pink/blue/brown silk+mohair I recently spun from the Hello Yarn spinning club.

Dyeing: Last night I dyed some more roving. This time I used the Cormo I got from Juniper Fiber Farms; they had a fund raiser so I bought 8 oz to help out. It's lovely stuff, very very soft. This time I made fewer mistakes.

1. I wore gloves. This meant I didn't have to be so cautious about where I touched stuff, because I wasn't worried about getting my hands stained. (AND I didn't get my hands stained.)

2. I used a half a teaspoon of citric acid along with some synthex in the soak before applying the dye. This meant the dye took better.

3. I put the pot on the stove in our kitchen. This, admittedly, was forced upon me because the shite hot plate I bought at Target (on which the larger burner broke a year ago) completely stopped working, but it also meant that the heat was more dependable. Instead of using the microwave, which is a method I don't like so much, I put some water in the bottom of my large pot and a steamer tray, and put the two plastic-wrapped dye+wool packages in there to steam for 30 mins. At the end of this, it was late and I was tired, so I put the pot in the basement stone sink to cool overnight.

This morning when I took the wool out of the plastic wrap, I still had to rinse it a bunch of times, but not as many as last week, which I think was due to the fact that I used more citric acid and also a lot less dye, so more of it actually discharged fully into the wool. (I am still using up all this concentrated dye from last year. I can't stand to just put it down the sink; I'm pretty sure that's not safe anyway. Once it's used up, I will go back to the regular method I was using last year, and I'll be better able to estimate how much dye I actually need for each 4 oz of wool.)

Sewing: (I know! SEWING!) It's been forever since I did any sewing. However, I came across a tutorial for a "summer scarf" (which, counterintuitively, could really come in handy in the over air conditioned office yours truly works in) and then also, about the same time, saw that Purl Soho had some Liberty prints in. The confluence of events was too much for me to resist, so I got a half a yard (it was SUPER OVER PRICED but I only needed a half a yard) and it arrived Friday night. Today I went out to Michael's and got some elastic beading thread so I could make this.

Now, I've been sewing practically my entire life, so this was a pretty easy little pattern, not a huge challenge for me, except for sewing with a bobbin of elastic thread, which I've never tried before. It was NOT successful. Maybe the elastic thread I bought was too wimpy, I don't know, but it snapped several times while I was sewing the two lines, and finally I decided it was too unreliable. So I found some elastic cord, about two millimeters in diameter I'd guess, that was a lot more sturdy, and I sewed it on the back of the scarf using zigzag to create a kind of channel that the cord ran through. I tied a knot on each end and sewed the extra end into the channel as well on each end. I think it came out pretty well!

Spinning: I'm not doing the Tour de Fleece, but I have been doing a lot of spinning lately anyway. I have some lovely yellow-gold-red-brown silk+cashmere that I got from Spirit Trail Fiberworks last year when I was in her spinning club (it was a terrific bargain, in my opinion, but I couldn't keep up with the rate she sent stuff so I still have a couple installments left over). I spun that last week, and Navajo-plied it to preserve the color shifts. I also started spinning some great brown superwash merino/cashmere/silk roving from Pigeonroof Studios. The color shifts in it are much more random and varied, so I will double ply it, most likely.

And I sorted the locks of the fleece I washed by color lightest to darkest, only to decide that I want to spin it all mixed up instead. I started carding it, this afternoon; that is hard work, and slow going. I have about 20 rolags so far and MUCH more to go. I am going to spin some of it tonight if Adam ever finishes playing this game he's been trying to win this afternoon. It's an annoying game so I don't want to sit in there while he's playing it. I hope he finishes soon!

Gardening: We had about a 5' square part of our garden that I had intended to plant with, well, several things, but which never got planted with anything. Instead I just put newspaper and hay down on it and hoped that would keep the weeds at bay. It did probably do a little good, but they figured out where the edges were and came up along there with a vengeance. Finally this weekend I summoned the energy and the desire to remediate this scourge.

We went to Home Depot, which itself is an unusual event. Adam had to get a special tool to take apart the inside of the car dash to install the AUX input on the stereo (that was my birthday present, both the kit and the installation). I got a bunch of dirt (which always feels stupid to me to have to pay for) to move a very small root-bound dewberry tree into a larger pot, and some trellis things to stake up the cucumbers.

It was SO HOT in the sun that I put up the umbrella over the table and worked under the shady side of that while I was doing the repotting. Then I went to do the weeding. As this was in the direct sun, I rigged up a lean-to shade along the fence using some stakes and some mulch paper. It kept blowing down and I had to keep moving it as the weeding progressed, but it helped a lot. Even with my goofy sun-shelter I had to come inside twice to cool off because I felt like I was getting sick from the heat. But I got the weeds all pulled up. I put down more hay all over that area and it looks a lot better.
 

Washing the fleece

So, I finally overcame my fear and put the fleece bags in the wash.

After reading various opinions from lots of different fiber arts bloggers, I decided that since this was just a single pound divided into several lingerie bags, I could put it all into the machine at the same time.

I used my top-loading machine and ran a large load full of hot water and put a generous squirt of Dawn dishwashing detergent, which was the brand most mentioned in blog posts on how to wash fleece.  Then I added the bags of sorted and arranged locks one at a time. I was careful not to agitate the wool. I let it soak for about 20 minutes and then pulled it out to drain the machine. The water was pretty brown - about like weak coffee with a little milk.

I ran a second load of hot water, added a generous squirt of Dawn again, and added the bags of fiber. After letting it sit for another 20 minutes, I pulled it out again, drained the machine - more like weak tea (no milk) this time. I re-filled with hot water once more. This time I left out the detergent and just put the bags back in. After 20 minutes more soaking, I switched the machine to the spin cycle and spun out all the water, which was clear.

I don't know if I did it right or not. Two things seem to have gone differently than I expected. One, when I pulled the bags out of the machine, my super neat rows of locks were gone and in their places were clumps, e.g.:

Maybe I didn't put enough wool in each bag. I did all the sorting and bag-filling according to what I thought I'd read, but then when I looked back through posts on the subject, it seemed that people had loaded a lot more wool into each bag, with layers of tulle (tutu netting) between layers of fleece.

When I removed these clumps from the bags, though, they did not appear to have felted, which was my biggest concern; I wasn't so focused on keeping the lock structure after I found how difficult it was to separate the locks in lots of cases. I spread out the contents of each bag (re-formatted into rows of locks) on top of the bag to dry.

The other outcome I think was wrong was, the tips of the locks were still brown. The lanolin was definitely mostly removed by the washing, that much is certain - I can't feel any grease on the locks now. But it still looks like the fleece is dirty on the tips. I thought the tips of the locks would be dark gray/silver/white after washing, but that brown was still there. I don't know if that means I should wash it all again or not - but I really don't want to. I don't think it would be bad for the wool to wash it again, but frankly it's a huge pain in the neck and I just want it to dry so I can try hand carding it and spinning it.

I'm glad I tried this, because I would rather have tried the process for myself than just depend on mills to process wool before I spin it, unaware of what work has gone into getting it from the sheep to my spinning wheel. But I doubt I will want to do it again, at least not by myself. I bet there are ten important things I did wrong. I bet there are ways I could have done it so the locks didn't get mashed up into clumps in the bags. I bet if I'd used the sink instead of the washing machine it would have been a totally different experience. So I'm not closing the door on the possibility of taking a class some time from somebody who knows what the hell they are doing.

* * * * *
It's my birthday weekend so I decided last night to make chocolate chip cookies. Once again I followed the recipe from "The New Best Recipe" for chewy ones, although I did add about a half cup of butterscotch chips to the mix.

They look great, and they were chewy, which I love, but the butterscotch morsels ruined them - they were WAY too sweet and cloying. I think if you are going to include butterscotch chips, you need to have dough that is less sweet. Also, these delightfully chewy cookies, when you put them in a storage container overnight, become rock hard by morning. This is the second time I've used this recipe and I'm here to tell you they do not store well. If you are going to use it, make sure you make the cookies as big as they say (otherwise they cook too fast) and only make the ones you are going to want to eat right then. You can make the rest into balls and keep them in the freezer for the next time you need some CCC's. (I ended up taking the leftovers to my meeting this morning. They got eaten.)
 

What a spectacular gift!

My mother sent me (and Adam, but mostly me) this gorgeous knitted, fulled rug she made for us. I know it was intended to be a wedding gift, but since it's almost my birthday, I'm co-opting it as my birthday present.

Here is a closeup of some of the stitch work.

I believe this was a pattern in the second Mason-Dixon Knitting book (which is a very fun read in addition to being useful and chock full of good patterns, btw).

It's fantastic and I LOVE IT! Thank you, Mom!

More work on the fleece; my thoughts on shooting a gun

I spent about two hours this evening sorting and ordering more of the fleece locks. I now have six (6) lingerie bags of locks with probably a quarter of the fleece left to go through.

This is really a tough task. I don't know that I'll do it again, unless the grid goes down and I have to.

* * * * *
I went to a shooting range with my husband and his sister and her family. I posted about this on Facebook briefly, but I wanted to show a couple of pictures I brought back from the shooting range. Here is Adam giving me a couple pointers on how to shoot a .45 H-K:

Here I am putting the advice into action:

I felt quite intimidated by the experience. First of all, it's incredibly LOUD. You get a noise-canceling headset, which is about 50% effective. I still felt like jumping every time other people were shooting, especially those shooting bigger guns (including machine guns). My SIL went and got some earplugs for herself and for me, and that PLUS the headset was a lot better. I could still hear plenty, but it wasn't startling.

Second, the gun itself was fairly heavy, and shooting it was tremendously forceful. You could say, well, DUH. Yeah, I know, but it's one thing to guess at this, and another entirely to experience that. The kickback was not as big as I expected. But I felt like I had a profoundly powerful and dangerous force in my hands, and I was keenly aware of not really knowing what I was doing or feeling comfortable. I also thought I would prefer not to be comfortable enough with it because I tend toward the cavalier attitude, and this is not a thing to be cavalier about.

I couldn't help thinking about all the cop and spy shows and movies I have seen over the years, the hundreds of guns and gun toters I've seen, how NONE OF THEM ever made it look like there was anything to it. It's not "no big deal," it's a huge deal to have this killing force in your hand. I feel shocked at how different the reality of shooting a gun is from what I have seen on TV.

I have to admit, I was delighted that I have good aim, that I got good shots right away. My dad was a sniper in the Army and a part of me would like to think I got something of that from him. I was pleased that it wasn't totally frustrating to try to hit the target.

I did quite well, so Adam challenged me to a grudge match - ten shots each, whoever scored best. He shot first and got a 90; however, he can't see, because he is too vain to get glasses. I'll take any advantage I can get. Anyway, I went next and got this:

If I ever do it again, I'd like to try shooting with a rifle, to see what it is like to do distance shooting. Also, my coworker was telling me about skeet and trap shooting, and that sounds like a fun challenge as well. But honestly? I could probably go the rest of my life without ever shooting a gun again, without any regret.
 

There's a lot of brown in this post

I've been up to a lot of different things and just haven't been blogging much about them. Here is a partial roundup.

I started working on the fiber I got as part of the group project my spinning guild is doing. One of the guild members has a sheep farm, among her animals a prize winning Romney sheep named Debbie, and a subset of guild members decided to buy Debbie's fleece together and divide it amongst ourselves. I got a pound, about what most other people got. A pound is a lot to spin, to me. I've had it for six weeks or more but haven't had a chance to deal with it. It's composed of unwashed locks, so I have to wash it first before anything else can be done with it. This weekend I started sorting it and putting it into lingerie bags to wash it.

Above is some I have begun to sort through. Below is one clump; I hope you can see how tangled it is; I had this idea that the locks would separate cleanly (and magically) into pieces that I could easily lay out into rows for washing. Not so!

One thing you cannot see is how much lanolin is in it. It's surprisingly free of vegetable matter (aka VM), but very greasy. This left my hands feeling extremely soft, once I washed the lanolin off.

After a while I got better at telling which end was which of the lock - the outside inch or so is brown with dirt (which I understand will wash out). You are supposed to lay them all in the same direction, so I tried to be careful about that. Below, you can see I have laid some of it into a lingerie bag; in the next picture, I tried to show the rows of locks inside the bag - I'm not sure if you can tell.

I filled two bags so far, and only have one more empty bag on hand. I need to go to Target and pick up as many as they have there. I think I might need up to 10 or 12. The next step, once the sorting is done, is to wash it carefully in very hot water, without agitating (so as not to felt it). I need to read more about how to do this, but I have read in several places about doing this in the washing machine. But is that going to leave a lot of lanolin gnarliness in my machine, afterward?

You may see one or the other of these ads in the next month on Ravelry. In fact, if you do, I'd love it if you dropped me a note saying so. It's not that I don't trust their record-keeping, but I certainly have no way of knowing if it's real. That said, they claim I will get around 30K impressions, in my exact market. Given that it cost me only $15, this is quite a deal. After all, I paid $150 for a print ad in BUST magazine, which, while I love BUST, did not seem to result in any additional traffic to my shop and definitely did not result in any additional sales. Not to mention there were no metrics to come out of it. Another time, I paid for a promo spot on Etsy which was useless as well, and they also provided no numbers. So, this is another test foray into buying advertising and I am keeping my expectations low, but I have to say that Ravelry is impressing me so far with how they are doing things. In particular, the fact that you can upload multiple creatives and they will split the impressions among them is very professional. I have yet to see what kind of statistics they provide, but I'm optimistic based on what I've seen so far.

In other news, I've been doing some fiber dyeing. I'm pretty excited about it. Maybe some planet moved out of opposition to another or something; all I know is after over a year of being completely blocked about doing any dyeing, last night I finally just went down to the basement and cleaned off the work table I have set up down there, filled up a pot with hot water and put it on the hot plate, measured out some fiber, and put it in the pot along with some dye. I have some leftover mixed up liquid dye that I would like to use up, rather than trying to figure out how to dispose of it safely. But it's just basic colors - blue, yellow, and brown - and I have felt constrained by that. I'd rather do something with more muted colors, the colors I have dancing around in my head, colors I have to mix from scratch. However, I figured it was best just to get working, rather than get all hung up on the particulars. So I used some of the brown and some of the blue.

I just now noticed that it matches the color scheme of my business logo. There are worse color schemes I could have picked for my first foray back into the world of dyeing!
 

Lifelines

I'm on about row 27 of Section B of Pine and Ivy. Here you can see the second lifeline, which I just added.




It's not super easy to see because it's kind of blurry (sorry, iPhone photo), but if you enlarge it you can see the pink one about 2 inches back and a new brown one just along the working edge. Just putting that in took me about 20 minutes. I hate this project.

Two nights ago I dropped a stitch again and couldn't recover from it. We were in the car on the way home from work and I had a minor meltdown. Once at home, and after having some dinner, I was able to recover things after all. But Adam told me if I didn't put in another lifeline, I would be a fool (and he would say "I told you so" if it happened again). Anything to avoid that. I took his advice.

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The Color Yellow

I planted these calla lilies last year and got foliage from only two, and no flowers; this year, all three came up, and two are showing flowers in this amazing brilliant yellow.




I didn't have any idea what color they would be when I planted them, but sort of expected white or green. Yellow? Who knew?




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