Wednesday, June 23, 2010

6.22 10 on Tuesday

10 ways to entertain a child

(How old a child? How much space do I have to work with?)

1. Play I Spy. This is good for many ages - for older kids just pick harder things.
2. Play Ghost. This is good for kids who are fairly confident with their spelling, or for those who need practice with their spelling, and has lasted us for many miles in the car after dark.
3. Play 20 questions.
4. Read them a story.
5. Tell them a story (stories of their parents' adventures as kids seem to be particularly fascinating).
6. Hand them a book.
7. Take them to a park.
8. Share telling a story - each person adds 2 or 3 sentences to the story as it goes.
9. Play cat's cradle.
10. Play My Aunt... and work your way through the alphabet.

Re: The merino and silk - modifying previously spun yarn is not even close to being an original idea. Go for it and have a blast. Merino is one of the fibers that does tend (in my experience) to be stretched out during the spinning process and then to shrink up again when it gets wet. It has an awful lot of natural crimp to the fiber. Silk doesn't shrink much at all, having no crimp, and the combination winds up being a yarn that poofs out on the merino side. I happen to like the effect, but if you want a symmetrical looking yarn it wouldn't be the way to go. It looks sort of faux boucle in effect and when it is knit up.

Alternatively, one could take two skeins of the Malabrigo lace, add twist to each and then ply them together for an all merino yarn, which would possibly be closer to fingering than lace, but I had an odd number of skeins to work with and wanted to keep it in a laceweight yarn.

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