Historic Fibers

Antidote

Doing something different is often the cure for annoyance and gloom. A downtown restaurant with a patio overlooking the main drag decided to start sponsoring bike races one evening a week, and we went a couple of days ago to support this idea. I took along the recalcitrant sock, figuring a balmy evening, a glass of wine, and bike racing would help ease the ripping of said sock:

It worked pretty well. There was a good crowd supporting the riders, and the races featured a cruiser race, with the heaviest town bikes ridden by cyclists in full racing kit. It was pretty hilarious. For the women's race, I was pleased to see a young woman who I regularly encounter on my rides demonstrating how it should be done. Even though I've never actually met her, it felt like someone I knew.

I had such a pleasant evening that the fact that I need to rip out more than I originally anticipated hardly fazed me at all.

In Which (Nearly) Everything Goes Wrong

[Warning: Whiny post ahead.] What an unutterably stupid weekend that was. Everything I touched went wrong, and it all started because of the UPS guy. I hate UPS. We have a drive-by UPS guy, who has a bad habit of gently tapping on the front door, then slapping the "sorry we missed you" note on the front door before sprinting away. If I'm upstairs, I rarely hear him, and if I do hear something I assume one of the cats jumped off the couch. This precedes an anxious couple of days of stalking the front door, trying to catch the UPS guy in the act of redelivery, which makes me inordinately cranky. That was Friday.

Saturday dawned with a phone call from my stylist, reciting the litany of health and personal reasons why she could not keep our appointment that day. I can't remember the last time we made an appointment and did not have to reschedule for these very same reasons. If she wasn't so good, I'd be looking for a replacement. So suddenly I had a wide open day to fill, and decided it was time to warp the loom. I had wound a warp probably a year ago and it was all ready to go, so I pulled out some books to refresh my memory and set off . . . only to find that 5 wayward threads had missed the cross in winding the warp. What this means is that no matter how I thread those 5 strands, they will be in the wrong place. I considered yanking the warp off the loom and depositing it in the trash bin, but calmed down and decided to ask my weaving mentors what to do about this, as soon as I can speak about it without cursing.

I decided to work on my nice, simple Zombie socks. I had picked up the gusset stitches and was merrily working away on my gusset decreases. I had gotten to the very last decrease, only to discover that I made a highly noticeable mistake several rounds back, and will have to rip out everything I've done to fix it. The offending sock is currently enjoying a time out.

So I moved on to dyeing. I have some commercially dyed variegated sock yarn that was just a bit . . . much. Too much color (there really is such a thing), too many disparate colors, and much too bright for me to wear. I decided to overdye the yarn, and after winding 4 skeins, I threw it in a dye pot with my very favorite red dye. The yarn simmered contentedly away, and I went back on Sunday to wash it out. And wash it out, and wash it out some more. I have no idea why, but this particular yarn and this particular dye did not have a happy conjoining, and I had some severe bleeding problems. You could even call it hemorrhaging. Ultimately, I put the wool yarn in a bucket with some Synthrapol, which is something I rarely do to wool. The Synthrapol takes excess dye out of fiber, but it seems to be a bit alkaline and leaves the wool feeling harsh, so then I have to correct the pH with Eucalan or a vinegar bath. But this was such a bad case of bleeding it was really the only option. Even after the Synthrapol and the Eucalan, I was still getting some minor  bleeding, which I'll have to live with.

And that was my weekend. Nobody died, and in the larger scheme of things, I realize that these are minor problems. Nevertheless, it was a weekend of long, drawn out irritants, a fact that I will probably take out on the UPS guy, if I ever catch him.

Badass Unicorn

Well, I thought it was funny.

Needs Must

Necessity is the mother of invention, and has dictated some felting lately. First off, Rhonda started asking about her tea cozy. Where is it? Have you started it yet? What will it look like? So I jettisoned my grandiose plans for sketching and prefelting and complicated constructions, and just pulled some felt and got on with it:

As it turned out, this was the right decision. She was enchanted with the felt, which was made with handpainted merino, flax, and bamboo. I set grommets for the drawstring holes, and handspun some bamboo for the twisted cord. Here it is in action:

The next necessity was a barrette for me. I've been letting my hair grow out a little bit, and it seems to frequently be at an awkward stage, so I needed something to keep it out of my eyes. I wired some felt beads and some glass beads onto a barrette blank, and voila:

Last but not least, I needed a new academic planner and the only ones available were pretty ugly. So I made a piece of flat felt using merino, Gotland, and alpaca/silk, then folded over the ends and stitched them into an agenda cover.

I haven't completely finished this yet, since it needs a magnetic closure. But here is a mock-up of what it will look like when done - an asymmetrical felt flap will be attached, with a sheep's horn button from Robin Lynde as embellishment:

Now I can relax. At the moment, I don't need another thing.

Of Scotland Sleeves and Zombie Heels

There has been slow progress on the knitting front, but it is progress nonetheless. Scotland has begun to acquire sleeves:

That's about 4 inches of sleeve, although stitches for both sleeves have been picked up. It turns out that the longer needles I thought I needed for the sleeves were too long, and I had the shorter ones already. Oh well.

The Orange Zombie socks have also been inching along. I always knit both socks simultaneously so that does tend to take a bit longer, but this is still a far cry from the days when I would knit a pair of socks in a week. I got the heel flaps done and turned both heels this weekend:

Even after dozens of pairs of socks, I still get a charge out of turning the heels. Unfortunately, the heel-turning hoopla is quickly followed by picking up gusset stitches, which is not nearly so entrancing. But I'll get around to it soon, since luckily the Tour de France is currently being staged and there is plenty of time to knit while watching the wheels spin 'round.

If Cheddar Could Talk

I imagine he would say, "And you think I have a problem," in a voice oddly reminiscent of James Earl Jones.

Mean Drunk

I've been pondering what to make for the Artery that is a) not expensive; and b) relatively quick to make, because the economy sucks and everyone feels broke whether they are or not, plus it is 8000 degrees outside and no one feels like wearing a wool hat, including me. And what I came up with were catnip toys.

The Artery has a number of items for dogs - leashes and dog clothes and all sorts of little plaques and thingies showing dogs being cute or displaying humanlike tendencies, and people buy them. Go figure. But there really isn't anything for cats. Plus, I have a built-in product review committee right in my own home.

So the back of my mind got busy trying to decide what shape these catnip items should take and finally settled on strawberries. You know, for the vegan cat. (Don't laugh - some people care about these things, which should be encouraged because it leaves more bacon cheeseburgers for the rest of us). These strawberries would be made of wool felt, which is a sustainably produced material, stuffed with wool and organic catnip. Of course. Here they are in production:

I made a couple of prototypes, and threw one on the floor so the feline focus group could have their say. Then I remembered why we don't have catnip toys in the house - Cheddar is a mean drunk. He is normally a sweet-tempered, if somewhat bossy cat, but he gets really nasty and scarily violent when exposed to the 'nip. Basically I had created a fluffy orange projectile missile with claws.

The Other Cat (technically, her name is Cinder because we couldn't come up with a good cheese name for her, but no one ever calls her that) took the strawberry away and hid in the closet with it until the fracas passed:

I have to admit, this seemed like a very good idea at the time.

Eventually, Cheddar sobered up and everyone stopped hiding from him. I'll finish up the other strawberries and remove them from the house as quickly as possible so we don't have an unfortunate repeat of last night's events. And perhaps look into a kitty twelve step program.

Something from Nothing

The weekend was unbearably hot, and there was really nothing else to do but stay inside and amuse myself with fiber. When I felt, I generally trim off the excess unfelted fiber and stuff it in a bag, and the bags were starting to stack up. My intention was to card up all those bedraggled bits and pieces, snippets and strands, and turn them into batts. In other words, I planned to make something useful out of nothing in particular.

So there I was, stuck inside with two whole days stretching ahead of me, and I was ready to tackle a time consuming and somewhat tedious task, just to divert my attention away from the fact that should I venture outside, I would instantly be incinerated. I got out the bags and got out the drum carder, and started to make a batt. I've always had the finest carding head on the carder since I've generally been making batts for spinning, and I want the batts to be smoothe and buttery. But for felting, I needed texture, so I switched over to the coarse carding head and started stuffing everything I could find or scrape off the floor through the carder.

Some of the batts look like clown barf:

Never fear, this will all melt into gorgeous felt. The lumps and squiggles will either disappear or create interest, and it's fine either way.

Some of the batts were so sublimely beautiful that they took my breath away:

The more subtle ones are pretty to look at, but they may completely disappear when felted. Time will tell.

I had 6-7 bags of fiber, and ended up with 16 batts in my arsenal:

In the end, a nothing weekend turned into something after all.

Slavic Uncle Monday

I've been reading Anne Lamott's book, Bird by Bird, which is a book about writing. I'm dealing with the mother of all writer's blocks - have been for some time now - and Lamott helps cast writing (or the lack thereof) in a humorous light. I especially like what she has to say about Mondays:

"Mondays are not good writing days. One has all that freedom over the weekend, all that authenticity, all those dreamy dreams, and then your angry mute Slavic Uncle Monday arrives, and it is time to sit down at your desk."

She recommends that you not try to write on Mondays ("Why set yourself up for failure?"), and I concur.

Mondrian Cake

Remember how I said I wanted to make a Mondrian hat? A pastry chef at SFMOMA makes one Mondrian cake each day. I want that cake.