I am making an announcement.  I am moving my blog over to a new site:

http://www.tintinafibres.com/

 

This blog got too personal and I want to have just a fibre arts blog where I can connect with other fibre artists or people interested in what I am doing.

Okay, it is the first Wednesday of the month so I guess I need to show my spinning projects I have finished recently or am working on.  I must confess that I have found a few spinning projects I had forgotten about but in the interests of full disclosure I am going to post them all despite how bad it looks.

While really angry about a dispute with my neighbour over the weekend I decided to spin and ply 4 oz of Shetland from Spunky Eclectic into a 3 ply yarn in less than 24 hours.  I think I will make something for one of my son’s out of this:

Okay.  Here come the spinning WIPs.  I was spinning yak on a little support spindle from punis:

 

However, my new Bosworth book charkha arrived and it was so much faster to spin the yak on that (why speed has become important will be apparent after reading this post).  The ball of singles is on the second wheel.

I found a project I was doing on a tulipwood Midi Bosworth spindle.  The batt is from Dyakcraft and it is Corriedale.

There is the Merino/yak I am doing on the Russian support spindle.

I have another project started on the wheel this week:

This has been my kitchen spindle for a long time and I think I just need to finish it already:

 

The camel project that I carry in my purse but haven’t finished more than a year later.  Yeah, I am going to finish that one too and get it done with:

Another project.  The batt is an Abbybatt and the spindle is an IST spindle:

Because I am clearly delusional, I decided to start a project aiming for a 2ply cobweb weight yarn with some Polwarth.  The spindle is a Tracy Eichheim:

 

Finally, I discovered this project:

 

There was one more but it was white and I am cutting my losses and just using the singles to ply with leftovers on bobbins for a leftover blanket.

DSCN0879, a photo by yukonviolet on Flickr.

This was black and white Jacob fleece that I dyed with annatto seeds, carded on my drum carder and spun on my wheel as a 3ply.

I am currently reading a fantastic book entitled A Perfect Mess. I know many of you are laughing but I really am loving this book and not because it justifies my main MO (method of operation) for my whole life.  I am not done yet but basically the authors go into how a lot of this organizing and purging is NOT time saving.  The reason for this being that a messy home reflects a person’s way of thinking.  Now these guys are not saying everyone should have a place that looks like Hoarders but just that so much time is wasted organizing things that don’t need to be organized.  They also point out that a person who can accept mess is able to adapt much more quickly to changes and is able to do so without many problems.  A lot of it refers to corporations and workplaces but still.  So for example if you are a person who stacks papers on your desk in piles chances are the oldest papers are on the bottom.  Therefore if you need a paper from 6 months ago you look in the area of the stack that you think is the 6 month old papers and find it.  This often takes much less time than filing all these papers and then having to find the file again just so there is nothing on the desk.  The best part about this book is that is says to lose the guilt over our messiness that we (messy people) all feel.  It isn’t just about physical mess but messy living.  I am one of these people who has wandered rather than taken a linear approach getting through life.  This works for me.  People say I am “interesting” when they meet me and I don’t try to be but I guess I have done things a little differently.  Recently, I have found 5 different spindles with projects on them.  Instead of feeling guilty about not finishing them I feel renewed excitement to finish something that was obviously dragging along however many months ago.  Now I am not going to stop cleaning or anything.  I usually whiz through my house once a week and wash the floors and clean the bathroom.  Also, I like to change the sheets on the beds once a week.  However, if there are stacks of books on a chair I don’t care as long as I don’t have mold or whatever growing on everything.  I am not a bleach person either so I just clean to the point of “good enough” and stop there.

 

Now the main part of the book that is life changing so far is that I have never invited people over because of the way my home looks.  Over the years people have said they don’t care but I have always convinced myself they are lying and never invited them over.  This book points out that a messy home reflects how a person actually is much more than a neat home.  Needless to say I have always been slightly eccentric and yet have always thought I need to have a neat house.  I am beginning to see that my hundreds of books and spinning projects all over the place is not a bad thing.  It is me.  The most interesting statement in the book that made this hit home is when the author points out that in the end when you look back the most important things did actually get done.  This is true.  My kids get to school on time and get fed.  Sometimes they have to dig through a towering stack of clean laundry to find clothes but eventually I run out of room and fold the laundry and put it away and do a bunch more.  My bills are always paid now and often paid the same day I get the mail in the mail.  Needless to say what do I have to worry about really if my MO is a little bit disorganized?  In the end I am taking a much simpler approach which is what I wanted in the beginning anyways. Minimalism is a lot of hard work and is in no way simple.  I want a relaxed lifestyle and not be stressed about my random thinking or little projects that spring off of other projects.  I am so not a linear thinking person.

 

I am writing this post right now while sitting on my bed.  My drumcarder is at the foot of my bed because my bedroom window has a large, south-facing window whereas my little studio just has a light.  A basket containing the fibre of long lost fibre for two of the recently found spindle projects is sitting on top of my pjs that are stacked on a shelf.  The cat cannot get up there and sleep in the basket mainly because the towering pile of clean laundry to be folded is rather unstable for a cat to use as a launching point.  The laundry is in a basket but leaning against the shelf I am using for my clothes because I gave my daughter my dresser when hers broke.  It all makes sense to me anyways even if it isn’t that organized.

 

Now I know I should fold that laundry but instead I am going to finish this book and take it from there.  I will probably talk more about it in another post.  The laundry will get folded today mainly because I need a basket to carry up the clean diapers.  It all gets done just not in a very organized way.

 

I had my drumcarder on an old change table but the boys needed something in their room for their toy bins and 4 bins fit perfectly on the change table to I put it in their room.  That left me without a place for my drum carder.  I had been looking at kitchen carts for some time as they have wheels.  With the variation in the amount of daylight I get it is nice to be able to move my drum carder towards a source of light.  The wheels lock on this cart (on just one side but it seems to be fine) and so I bought it when I was in Whitehorse last Wednesday.  I put it together yesterday.  I am rather excited to start making some batts but I have a very interesting book I am reading and I need to dehydrate a bunch of vegetables tomorrow.  I will do a post on the book once I am finished it.  I also need to post about my Jacob wool I spun up on the weekend.

I got my charkha in the mail on Wednesday but wasn’t able to pick it up until yesterday.  I ordered it in July and was lucky as those a little after me have to wait until the summer to get theirs.  This style of charkha was often used by Gandhi and it primarily used for spinning cotton but is good for other short fibres too.  You could spin a lot of different fibres on it I guess but with such a high ratio (70:1) it is best for high twist yarns.

 

I am not good at spinning cotton at all.  It is not a really fast fibre to spin and is completely different than wool.  I watched Stepheni Gaustad’s video Spinning Cotton, and am now able to make cotton yarn.  Not great cotton yarn but a start anyways.

Now, I would have to consider myself one of these people who doesn’t panic easily when it comes to natural disasters.  I do remember my grandparents and my siblings driving along St. Albert Trail when the big tornado hit Edmonton.  My grandpa had to pull off into a parking lot because the rain was so bad the windshield wipers couldn’t keep up.  What has happened in Japan has me reviewing my own natural disaster plan which to be quite frank isn’t very good.  In the Yukon, the main natural disaster, aside from the cold weather which is something I am well planned for, is a forest fire.  In the event of a forest fire, which happen every summer but usually not too close, I would have to evacuate obviously because of the smoke even if the fire didn’t burn my place down.  The last forest fire we had close by  made me rather wheezy so having a fresh ventolin inhaler is a good idea for me with my mild asthma.  I am no good to my kids if I can’t breathe well.  I do have some water stored in my basement and of course with my buying once a month I have a fair amount of food in the house.  Unfortunately, I freeze a lot of food and in the summer that isn’t going to be helpful.

 

The simple option for me is to get something already prepared for me and then add any extras I might need (like medicine and pet food).  I have ordered some things from Briden Solutions taking the easy approach because let’s face it I don’t want to spend a lot of time assembling something myself.  Obviously, I will review it when it arrives and figure out what else I will need to keep with it in my front hall closet (tent and sleeping bags come to mind).  My way of dealing with news of a disaster like this is to take some sort of action that makes me feel better.  My heart goes out to those people and I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like.

So I left some wool in a weld dyebath overnight.  I would show you a picture but it is a fairly light yellow and my camera sucks at picking up subtle yellows I have discovered.  Actually my camera isn’t very good at picking up colours at all but getting a decent one is not high on my list of priorities at the moment.

 

I have been asked to do a demo or a workshop at the local Crane and Sheep Festival in May.  I normally make some toy wheel spindles and bring some different types of fibre.  I think I will make some batts of some naturally dyed wool too.  If I am doing a demo I just show people spinning but obviously a workshop is a little more involved.  I do spindle spinning because I am much better at that than wheel spinning.  Also, the people can take the spindles home and keep practicing.  It is the first festival of the year in the Yukon and some die-hards even camp.  We will see how it goes.

 

Today I did Logwood.  I also washed 5 pounds of fleece so it was a productive day for me.  I did start some Weld but I won’t be done with it until tomorrow.

I did some dyeing today.  I had some scoured Romney and some scoured grey Gotland.  I was going to dye with some barberry roots and bark I had soaking but it was moldy and not usable.  I did madder root instead.  I did not put any cream of tartar in the mordant bath with the alum as I hadn’t planned on doing a red dye.  Anyways, it was looking pretty orange so I added some crushed Tums hoping that would raise the pH and bring the colour over to red but it didn’t on the nearest batch in the picture (I added it during the dye) but showed up more on the Gotland.  I had to add more madder root in a muslin bag to the dye bath to get a stronger colour.