This weekend's show

I spend this weekend in Orange County at the Piecemakers spring craft show. We had a great time and sold lots of yarn :) It's good to be back home in the regular swing of things, though...

Hypothesis

Has anyone done a study investigating a possible link between the current crowd of urban homesteader-types - the ones with worm composters on their balconies, yeast cultures in their refrigerators, and couches covered in wool (okay, that's all me) - and degree of completion of the Little House on the Prairie book series? Well, no need, cause it's obvious. Some of us used to fall asleep to idyllic tales of field clearing and cow milking. Now we feel compelled to make stuff by hand that industrialization and urbanization took care of years ago. Actually, now that I think about it, I feel that I have a clear, narrative understanding of the process of maple syrup production, which on direct consideration could only have come from LIW herself. Also how to plow a field, how to seal up a brand-new log cabin, and what to do in a blizzard if your only shelter is a sod dugout and you need to go milk your cow. I'm also remembering a childhood terror of tornadoes, which since I didn't grow up in a trailer in Kansas under a giant leaning oak tree, can only be justified by the occasional tornado drama in LHOTP. Awesome.

By the way, the TV show was bullshit.

New handspun!

Where have I been? Spinning, of course! Since I've gotten my wheel I've been loving the spinning, and have finished my first for-sale yarn and am working on my second. The one in the photo here is my first (this is the hanks hanging to dry, before they twisted into skeins). It's a chocolate-brown and white wool from the Sheep Shed Studio, plied with a sweater-recycled white silk/cotton. I'm quite happy with it - granted that I don't have enough spinning skill to turn out any other kind of yarn yet (it's squishy, slubby thick-and-thin). Actually, my drafting technique has been improving, I think, as I work on my second for-sale handspun project (deep blue and white, like Delft china, also from the Sheep Shed - gotta recycle!). Maybe on my next project I'll try for a more even yarn, but for now, I'm enjoying the funky, textured stuff I'm making.

By the way, this yarn will make it into my Etsy shop eventually, but I've slowed down my new listings there as I prepare for my first craft show in April, so there's quite a queue of new yarn waiting to make it into my Etsy shop. And that's my project for today - working on getting my booth stuff together (tables, tablecloths, etc.). I'd love to do it all from thrift store finds, but it's hard to balance that with efficiency, organization and what will fit in my little car. Clunky mismatched wooden end tables aren't going to work. It might just be an Ikea trip for me...

This week's haul

Lately I've been skeining up an entire week's worth of yarn at once before tagging it and putting it away, which means that I get a table full of yarn like this photo. It's so fun to see a week's worth of work all together like that - and this wasn't even a very yarn-intensive week.

My first wheel!

I got this wheel this Tuesday through Craigslist. It's presumably handmade, or at least has no brand markings. What it has are lots of imperfections and challenges, but I could afford it! My thanks to the seller, cinediva on Ravelry, for showing me how she gets the poor thing to work, and for offering her continued support as I learn the ways of this rickety old wheel.

Whoever made it was apparently committed to the classic look of the wheel (not that it came out particularly beautifully), which unfortunately means that they made most of the joints and fasteners out of wood when it clearly wasn't a strong enough material. Note, for example, the lovely binder-clip holding the footman on the shaft. This replaces a little wooden knob that screwed on - but the wooden threads couldn't take the force and were stripped away. Fortunately, these things are easily fixed by 39 cents worth of metal hardware and a modernist disregard for the hand-crafted wood style of the wheel.

The tension system, I'm told, is Irish. This is what it looks like right now. Clearly something is amiss - presumably a silly little wooden piece that broke decades ago. It works, though, especially because all I'm doing on it (so far) is plying my recycled yarn. I finished up a project I had started on my drop spindle (which will be listed in my Etsy shop next week) and have started the next one. Sure, it's not a wheel to drool over, but it's still a wheel and so definitely worth the $70 to retire my drop spindle. Yay! Now I just need to spend a couple bucks at the hardware store to fix its most egregious shortcomings, and eventually look for more bobbins that will fit it (it only came with one).

Farewell, sweet kitty

My cat Ninja was killed by a car on Sunday.


This is her as a baby. She was a total yarn muncher.

I'm very sad about it. That is all.

More warm and fuzzies

Continuing my edge-of-your-seat series on Etsy sellers who use my yarn, here's another great knitter, Smitten Kitten Originals.

SKO sells a huge variety of knitted scarves, face cloths, throws, and all kinds of other knitted accessories. They all look so nice, especially today when I'm sitting wrapped in a blanket in my chilly house. (Well, okay, it might be my own damn fault, considering I left the door open all day so my cats could go in and out to their hearts' content - I'm a pushover.) Anyway, the warm and fuzzy thing in the photo here is "Parker", a gorgeous scarf made with a commercial eyelash yarn and a C R A F T Y merino wool. Be sure to check out Smitten Kitten Originals' blog for more upcoming knits!