Ten on Tuesday

Inspired by Knot Much of a Knitter I'm trying my hand at at Ten for Tuesday list:

Ten Things You Wish You Knew How to Do:

1. Change the oil on my car. I know how to check the oil and put air in the tires, and that's about it.

2. Cook by the seat of my pants. I'm great at following recipes, not so much on following my gut.

3. Make beer. It seems like it would be fun.

4. Read poetry and enjoy it. I get too wrapped up in the rhythm of the words and forget to pay attention to the meaning.

5. Ride a motorcycle. Vroom vroom. Enough said.

6. Code html. I'm sure I could learn it but I don't think I have the patience.

7. Play the guitar. I can strum a few chords but I'd love to be able to play well.

8. Speak Mandarin. My kids and husband are all learning it but not me and I don't have a clue.

9. Take better photographs. I look at Jared Flood's photos and think that man could make a brillo pad look beautiful!

10. Draw. I can sketch clothing and draw precise technical specs for clothes but I can't drawing life-like pictures of much of anything. And I went to art school!

Deep Color Merino - Spinning!

I have resumed my acquaintance with my spinning wheel again lately and I am thrilled to discover that I love spinning just as much as I ever did, if not more.

I am a self-taught spinner. My spinning journey started with a single class on spindle spinning, and I took a couple of lessons on spinning cotton a few years after that, and everything else I know about spinning is from reading. As I started spinning again a little bit in the past year I found myself seriously lacking in confidence about my abilities. I thought I might either know a lot more than I thought, or almost nothing. But I wasn't sure.

The in October I took two classes with Stephenie Gaustad at Lambtown. If you ever have an opportunity to take a class with Stephenie I highly recommend her as a teacher - she's extremely knowledgeable, patient, kind and with a lovely sense of humour.

I took a class on spinning worsted style and a class on spinning fast, soft yarn in a long draw style. I was excited to both learn a lot of new information and also discover that I was a decent spinner to start with.

I came home from the class fired up to spin. I had some merino fiber from Deep Color that I purchased at Stitches (either 2008 or 2007). I had started spinning it in May of 2008 using a modified worsted style and it was kind of slow going. I decided to finish spinning this fiber before moving on to something else, which might have been a mistake because I couldn't use either of my new techniques because I wanted to finish this spinning in the same bastard style I had started it.

In any case I finished this yarn quickly and was thrilled with how it turned out. I would call it a fingering weight, it's two ply, and though it's the finest yarn I've ever spun it is soft and has a lovely drape.









I have moved on to another spinning project in the long draw that I learned from Stephenie and it is going well - but it's almost three pounds of fiber!

More conversations with my son

As part of an ongoing series, here's yet another conversation with my 4 1/2 year old son.

Yesterday we had some friends over for a visit. We hadn't seen these friends in a while and Buddy didn't remember them, so he was asking about them.

Buddy: are they a man and a woman or both womens (in fairness, one of them has an androgynous nickname).

Me: they are both women.

Buddy: they are married?

Me: yes.

Buddy: them must be from another state.

Me: no, they got married here in California while it was still legal, but it's not legal now.

Buddy: when I get big, my am going to be politics, so my can make it okay for mens to marry mens, and women to marry womens.

I'm astonished at the things he has put together from conversations had and overheard, little bits of News Hour, and osmosis. And I'm thrilled with his politics!

Socks of Love

I have been knitting socks for a long time. I put off making my first sock for an even longer time before that.

As an experienced knitter I spent a couple of years (off and on) reading a sock knitting pattern and wondering "what the hell?" There just didn't seem to be any way that it would work! I don't have a good visual/spacial mental imagery ability, so as I read the instructions I would get to a point where I just couldn't picture how the next step would work, and I wasn't going to start the pattern if I couldn't understand it.

That went on for some time, until I got fed up and just started knitting. I got to the confusing point and kept on going, trusting the pattern writer (and technical editor) that it would work.

And it did. It was magic, pure effing magic.

I don't know how many years ago I knit that first sock, but I think it was before we moved to the west coast so that's been at least twelve years. I have knit lots of socks since then, and have for the last five years or so always had a sock in progress. I've knit them for myself, for two different friends, for my husband, for my MIL, my FIL, but for the longest time I didn't knit any for my mother.

She didn't want any.

This was strange for so many reasons:
-my mom was a knitter. A fabulous knitter who appreciated handknits.
-my mom is from the South but lives in the Northeast, and she is always cold. Always.
-she wears wool socks much of the year (again, always cold).

I asked her once why she didn't like hand knit wool socks, and she said they would be too scratchy, too rough, not washable, she liked the store bought ones, etc.

Finally I got tired of asking for explanations and I just handed a sock to her one day and told her to try it on (after first explaining that she couldn't have that one, it was already promised to someone else).

She skeptically pulled the sock on her foot and her eyes went wide. "OH" she said in tones of wonderment, "I like this!"

I graciously refrained from saying "I told you so" and promised to make her socks for her very own. I made her one pair in Socks that Rock, and the next time she came to visit she very coyly told me that if I made her more socks she would wear them!

So I made her another pair in STR. And another pair in Cherry Tree Hill Supersock. And she wore them and wore them and wore them. Until, you guessed it, she wore through them.

So I have learned how to darn socks. (In the meantime I made her another pair in a yarn with 20% nylon and am working on yet another pair with nylon content).

One pair just had little holes at the toe, those were fairly quick to darn.

You can tell where they are darned because I was darning in green/yellow leftover sock yarn. One of the downsides of almost always knitting socks toe-up is that I have almost no leftover sock yarn in the house.

The remaining two pair have big holes under the heel of the foot.


Because my mother is very sensitive to rough edges and ridges in her clothes, I am darning a large amount of surface area. It's tedious, you have to watch carefully what you are doing, and it generates lot of ends. I am not enjoying it very much, but I will do this for my mother. My mother is not well and living three thousand miles away there's not a lot I can do for her, but this I can and will do.

Let's not talk about the holes in The Italian's socks.

A Lovely Weekend

We have had a busy last week and a half (busier than normal).

Last week my delightful friend and her charming husband came to stay for a few days. He had a work conference on the West Coast and she joined him at the end for a little R&R. They were with us from Thursday morning to Saturday morning and it was a lot of fun.

Jill has been a good friend since sophomore year of high school, and has been a friend of The Italian's since almost as long as I've known him. Her man is a good guy and they complement each other well. They are a child-free couple but they like kids, so they are fun to have around the children. (They have the patience of people who don't have to be patient with children all day, every day!) Plus they didn't have any agenda other than just hanging out with us.

So we did fun things like going to both kids' Halloween parades, we took them to our local German Butcher (they like meat!) and we ate some good food. It was a good time. The Italian took this picture of them at one of the kids' parades:


It is always a relief and a treat when a good friend marries someone that you like very much, it makes spending time together that much more enjoyable.

After they left we spent the day getting ready for the evening's trick or treating, at which point we were joined by another couple, also child-free, who came for the evening. It was so much fun to have extra grownups around - it meant that we could take turns taking the kids out trick or treating and still have company to enjoy the evening with. Lara is a friend from college and her man is a great guy, I feel lucky to have good friends like all of these.

Halloween

This year's Halloween was a smashing success.




As I have in past years I sewed their costumes. Punkin was very concerned that I wouldn't finish in time because I started with her brother's costume, but I had everything finished by the time I went to bed on Thursday.

They had parades at school and we took them trick or treating on Saturday night. They enjoyed their costumes and going out in the neighborhood. I got my mama yayas hearing lots of people exclaim over their costumes - I don't normally pay much attention to what my kids are wearing but I like making their costumes every year.

My costume appears to be that of a graying middle-aged woman - I knew my hair was getting gray but for pete's sake it looks like it's been highlighted! Wow!



Now I need to start thinking about making Christmas presents. I'm on the hook to make stockings for my niece and my son this year, and having never done it I'm not sure how big a project I'm in for. The stockings are velvet with appliqued embroidered felt characters all over them. The originals came from a little old lady in the town where my parents grew up. When more stockings were needed my mother started making them, but she can't do it anymore so the task has fallen to me.

I'd much rather be spinning!