Busy Girl

Well, it took about 7 weeks of vacation and a 20 degree drop in the temperature, but I finally got my motivation back.  Yesterday I woke up and just knew it was time to get some stuff done around the house. 


1. Some beat up door frames



got a fresh coat of paint.



2. I shelled out for a new hacksaw,



which made easy work of cutting the downspouts in preparation for my new rain barrels. 




I seem to be having a Murphy's law kind of relationship with these barrels.  Before we ordered them, it was painfully dry around here.  No big deal, since I didn't have any barrels with which to "harvest" any rain.  Then we got them, and it rained gallons and gallons, but of course they were in the garage waiting to be installed so they still didn't do us any good.  Now they are installed, and it stands to reason that it will never rain again.  Just as well; I still have one more coat of paint to put on the doors.

3. On the inside of the house, I attended to some long neglected projects.  The highest-impact project was the re-installation of the TP holder in the downstairs bathrooom.  Despite all my instructions to the builder to make sure that all towel bars and TP holders were firmly anchored to studs, this one got installed just in the drywall and it has been out of service for more than half of our 6 years here.  Last year I decided I would fix it and got as far as making half a dozen  or so exploratory holes in the walls

 


before I stripped the screws and got the holder stuck in a piece of accessory wood that was meant to serve as a plaque on which to mount the TP holder.  Because I had stripped the screws, I couldn't get the TP holder out of the 'plaque' without a saw, which I couldn't find.  I got annoyed and decided to set the project aside until it stopped making me mad.

Yesterday I decided that I was mighty and dreadful and I set my TP holder free again by stomping on the plaque until it broke into a thousand pieces.  I bought some washers and screws and was on the verge of fussing about the absence of a replacement plaque when I realized that the TP holder screws could be set in a vertical line (I was originally waylaid by a pair of very misleading holes set horizontally in the TP holder --a total red herring) and that the whole plaque escapade had been an unnecessary diversion.  To top it all off, it turned out that two of the holes I made last year were perfectly spaced and reasonably well located for the TP holder.  And here it is!  Holes have been filled and I even searched the house and found the wall paint for finishing the job.  I can't imagine it will match after all this time, but it will be much better than looking at all the white dots on the wall.



4. While I had the spackle out to fill the holes in the bathroom walls, I also filled the holes made when the dog freaked out about the chickens and tore the curtains [story here] (which have since been cleverly used to make secret hideouts on the bunk beds, where the extra ventilation in the curtains is actually a good thing).



5. Catching up on some knitting and spinning stuff, here is a picture of my final Tour de Fleece project, which was 4 ounces of Spinner's Hill fiber that I got from Dizzy Sheep. After all that worsted weight long draw spinning, I was in the mood for some very fine and smooth spinning and this ended up being over 590 yards of a light fingering weight.  The colors mixed beautifully and I'm hoping it will be just as pretty when I knit it, though I have no clue what I'll make with it yet.



I did not meet my goal of spinning all 4 pounds of fiber, but I did finish all of my merino fleece, I filled two bobbins of the autumn bat (although I still have 5 bobbins/10 ounces total) left to spin, and I had a lot of fun.


While I was busy spinning, Dizzy put some Dream in Color yarn up for sale and I bought two skeins of purple to make this sweet little sweater for a new cousin of ours.  I'm trying to knit really fast because I'm worried that the sweater might be closer to a 12 month size than the 18 month size that I think is really what  a March baby might wear for this winter.  Then again, my babies were kind of hefty, and maybe this new cousin will be petite and I won't have to worry.



All this sweater knitting for baby Delilah led my baby to ask when I was going to knit him a sweater. To prove how earnest and desperate he was to wear a hand knit sweater, he made moony eyes at me and tried to stuff himself into a tiny little sweater that I had pulled out of storage to use as a guide for the size of Delilah's sweater.  I was powerless to resist that much cuteness and I ordered a few skeins of this yarn to make him a little sweater from the Green Mountain Spinnery Knitting Book.  What a sucker!



6. The busy-ness will continue today, if I ever get off my blogging duff and get to work.  This nice little pile of materials was delivered yesterday (as was my new anti-fatigue floor mat from the nice people at Williams-Sonoma; I told you it was busy around here) and is waiting to be made into a mini-coop for this year's babies.  They are getting a little stinky in the garage, and I think it's high time they were turned out into more natural surroundings.   I'm pretty sure they agree; every time I pull back the netting over their box, at least one of them tries to make a break for it.



Off to work!!

Whoops . . .

So back to the whole shopping thing:  Yes, I am one of those people who sits down the night before shopping day (and yes, there is a shopping day) and plans out a week's worth of dinner menus so that I don't buy (too many) useless items and, more importantly, so that I am  never, ever caught lacking that crucial ingredient without which dinner cannot possibly occur.  Imagine my surprise, then, when tonight's menu (yes, there really is a menu, and I post it on the fridge so that I don't forget what all those carefully planned food purchases are for) clearly said that we would be eating tortellini, pesto, and broccoli, but there was neither tortellini nor broccoli in the house. 

No biggie, you might say.  But you might also be the kind of person who is mentally prepared to vary from the menu.  And you might be the kind of person who is not trying to create a nutritionally balanced meal at 8:00 on soccer night. And you just might be the kind of person who has a full box of some other pasta in the pantry, rather than the tail ends of several boxes of  wildly disparate pasta. And you might be a person who shops on a day that is not tomorrow, such that you might actually have a little food left in the house.  

I, on the other hand, would appear to be your polar opposite, and this might account for the bizarre combination of scrap foods that I am about to throw down on the table and call dinner.



I will, however, be putting the pesto away so that I can pretend that-- instead of totally being caught with my culinary pants down-- I just changed my mind.

p.s. A word to the wise:  if you are the kind of person who sits and finishes a blog post (or a bobbin of spinning, or a row (or 10) of knitting) before fishing your pasta out of the pot, you might just find that your pierogies do not appreciate the extra time in the bath and will protest by bursting open and emptying their filling into the cooking water, thereby rendering them a meaningless addition to your impromptu dinner menu.  I think they should come with a government warning to this effect, but they don't, so I thought I better pick up the slack.

p.p.s. Just in case you were wondering, here is the result of my Spinarellarama (note the capital letter there; I thought such a grand event merited an elevation in status):



This is about 1300 (1311, to be exact) yards of yarn.  I'm thinking I'll weave something with it, but I don't really know what yet.

Having finished all my merino fleece (yay me!!!), I am treating myself to a brief affair with this purple loveliness:



I'm plugging away at the second bobbin today, and I hope to ply it tomorrow, then I'll get back to my regularly scheduled spinning.

Bon appetit!

Spinarellarama!

Once upon a time when the world was young, El Husbando took his nephew ice skating. The nephew, being a brand new skater, was a unsteady on his feet and eventually El Husbando arranged the little guy on a pylon and pushed him around the rink. And around the rink. And around the rink. As they went around, they sometimes did a little spin, and sometimes they did a bigger spin. And what is a fancy spin move without a spiffy name? So El Husbando started to say things like "spin-a-rama!" and "spin-a-rella-rama!" as they turned, because he's really fun that way. Unfortunately, the nephew had just reached that charming age when children decide that they are wise in the ways of the world and don't have to put up with your juvenile crap any more. On the next spin move, he turned to El Husbando with a dignified expression and said, in that scathing way that little kids have when they have caught you in an error, "Uncle Al, spinarellarama is not a real word."

I'm not sure that El Husbando ever recovered from the heartbreak of that moment. A perfectly good word and a fancy skating move all dashed to bits by the Junior Reality Police. Fortunately, he married me and I don't have these issues. I hereby proclaim that spinarellarama is a perfectly good word. In fact, it is so good that I believe its meaning should not be limited to "a fancy skating move," but should be extended to refer to any really fun event that involves a lot of spinning. Such as the Tour de Fleece.

Ha! Didn't see that coming, did you?

I have now been spinning for a full week, with occasional breaks for swimming and laundry and dinner making.  I have made a noticeable (to me, anyway) dent in the stash and have produced 4.2 skeins of yarn (the 0.2 being a 30 yard skein made from the leftovers of some mismatched bobbins) weighing a total of 14.5 ounces.

(two skeins of undyed merino)


(one skein of kool-aid dyed merino plied with a merino/mohair blend)


(30 yards of the kool-aid dyed merino all by itself)


(275 yards of Spinner's Hill goodness)

I also have two bobbins waiting to be plied into skein number 6,


(top one is another merino-mohair blend, bottom one is plain vanilla merino)

and I have begun work on the first bobbin of  skein number 7, which is being spun from more of this merino/mohair fluffy stuff:



I have been happily devouring the same merino fleece that nearly kicked my boo-tocks during the 2009 TdF,  which has been reduced to this:

 

(See? Of the 14 batts I started with, there are only 4 left in the bag.  Two are on today's schedule, and my hope is to have spun and plied the remainder by Tuesday night. No lie.)

And, as of yesterday, I seem to have crossed some sort of speed spinning divide and am making yarn a lot faster than I used to.  I am having a true spinarellarama.

As if that were not enough joy for one week, I have finally turned the heel of my second Nutkin sock, curse its little yarny head. Just a handful of pattern repeats and I will be free-- FREE, I tell you -- to move on to another yarn and a more cooperative pattern.

An last, for the cherry on this sundae, here is a sneak peak of my anniversary present. 






15 years of wedded bliss, all wrapped up in a well-matched pair of Northern Red Oak trees and planted right on my anniversary.  Love the trees, love the symbolism.  Hurray for us!

Summer!

Well, we're nearly two weeks into the famed summer vacation and-- despite numerous threats-- nobody has died of boredom yet.  This is a little surprising because we haven't really done much with our vacation.

It wouldn't be the beginning of summer, though, if we didn't put on our protective gear and prepare for some construction work.



Top of the to do list:  The Grill.  I say this with Capital Letters because this is a handsome and venerable piece of outdoor cooking equipment that cost more than my indoor cooking range. The Grill showed up in a Very Large Box, large enough to contain both a giggly pre-schooler




and an entire fleet of Little People vehicles.



Times sure have changed since I put together my last grill.  That project took days.  This one went from mess-on-the-garage-floor status



to full-grown-grill in the space of a few hours.  Isn't it beautiful?



It works, too.  We tested it out with some grilled chicken and it performed exactly as expected, which was a pleasant surprise.

As an added bonus, the box was the perfect size to house the new chicks, who have grown quite a bit over the past two weeks.  They resent the current heat wave, though.  I had to give them my office fan so they wouldn't fuss and now I resent the heat a little more too.



These chairs were next on the list:




they are now stained (in a good way) and waiting outside to afford us comfortable seating should the weather ever moderate itself.

There is no knitting news this week, only spinning news.  With the start of the Tour de France comes the Tour de Fleece.  Gung ho spinners everywhere make it their business to spin at least a little every day that the real Tour rides. People set varying goals (spinning for a certain amount of time every day, learning a new technique, etc.) and mine is volume related.  I set aside 48 ounces of fiber to be spun over the next three weeks.


(about 24 ounces of merino from  a fleece given to me last year; I spun the first half of this fleece in last year's TdF and whined the entire time because I did not do a good job carding it and it was SOOO white)


(a variety of batts from the nice lady who runs Spinner's Hill.  The purple and green are 4 ounces each, the two multi-color blobs are silk hankies set aside for my challenge day, and the rust colored stuff in the background is 14 ounces of a beautiful autumn colored batt)

To do this, I have to average more than 2 ounces of fiber a day, which can take up to 2 hours for me.

So far, I'm off to a reasonably good start.  On day 1, I spun and plied 3 ounces of the merino into a 146 yard skein.  This year I drum carded the fiber and this was the first time I have spun with one of the batts I made.  Much better than the crummy hand carded stuff I was spinning last year.

On day 2, I spun 2 ounces of my autumn batt and then started plying it with 2 ounces of the same stuff that I spun earlier in the spring.



The resulting skein is 275 yards of yummy.  It's a good thing I like it, because I have 12 ounces left to go.  Yesterday was day 3; I finished plying the rust stuff and started spinning some more plain white merino.  If you have any curiosity left about all this spinning stuff, just scroll up and look at the pictures again.  It's going to look a lot like this around here for the next week or so.

Life here has not been only about spinning and Grills. We have been honing our fashion sensibilities.  First up, we have Supermodel Matty to show us the latest in Hockey safety accessories:



And, what would summer footwear be without those ultra-stylish "invisible socks" that they hand out like candy at the shoe stores? Yummm!  Who wouldn't want to wear these all day long?



And last, I usually go on at length about all the reasons why children should not be allowed unrestricted access to cameras.  Reasons like Cornbread on 4H Picnic Table

Bedsheets and Floor Balloons,


Meditations on The Color Red,


Mysterious Snake of the Modern Suburban Laundry Room


and the long misunderstood Nearly Headless Chicken.

But every once in a while, they surprise us with a  gem like Sunlight through the Trees


or even Glorious Rainbow.


I think there is still hope for them.