Progress is being made on the striped shawl. I'm dithering over how much yarn to save for the border. I've moved from thinking "i have plenty" to thinking "i better get spinning". Spinning would be good because I'd like the border to be fairly monochrome AND if I take out the skeins that are currently appropriate, the balance of the shawl swings to darker than I'd like. SO... I think I need to rid the spindles of the blue silk and go back to spinning BFL.

Knitting has been going on swimmingly. I'd been neglecting the jaguar for the knitting, but this is becoming bad for the wrists. I'm making myself stop and do stitching in the evening, partly because I don't want to lose momentum on the jaguar and partly because I really need to not knit. We're down to the nose now, at least in outline.

I trundled over to the shop and let her persuade me that lavender is really a shade of grey and will look just peachy keen under the jaguar's chin. I remain unconvinced, but this is why other people's color designs always look better to me than my own. He's really looking almost 3d in this pic isn't he?

I hate showing people stuff that isn't working - but if I don't take pictures of it, it's difficult to discuss why it wasn't working post facto. So. That being the case, i.e. no I didn't take any pictures at the time...

Once upon a time, about a year ago, I bought a bump of red/yellow/orange blue faced leicester top. Lovely stuff.

Over the course of several months, and with the aid of two spindles, the bump became quite a number of skeins, comprising approximately 1500 yards with an average of 3000 ypp. This has been destined to form a shawl, but I haven't been able to agree with myself on a pattern. Multicolored yarn does best in a simple pattern; complicated lace patterns get lost in the changes of color and vice versa.

The Stonington shawl seemed to offer a possibility. I began knitting. And knitted and knitted all the time assuring myself that this was going to work. Stonington is a garter stitch Shetland style with a simple block in the center and a relatively plain border. Sadly, this is where a picture at the time would make more sense of the narrative. This is the remains of ripping the Stonington try - it had gotten to the point of having it's cross section of 145 stitches and had moved on to a reduced number (approximately 70) before I threw in the towel and ripped.

Changing colors in the shawl would have worked had the repeats been shorter, but having wildly varying depth of stripes as the triangle grew and then shrank again was not a pleasing sight. J hates watching me rip stuff - I didn't let me see me do that one.

I spent some time poring over shawl books and finally decided that for the length color repeat I had, I wanted something with unchanging row length and a very long row length at that. The Knitted Ruana in Cheryl Oberle's Folk Shawls is an excellent example of handling the color changes in long thin stripes, and The Rebozo from the same book gave me a pattern to launch off from.

The last problem was simply the fact that for such a long length, (at 5 stitches to the inch, 320 stitches is over 5 feet long, not that it looks like it, unblocked) I really needed to use a provisional cast on. I'll add a narrow border all the way around and remove the waste yarn later.

The stripes are still there, but much narrower and more pleasing to the eye. My eye at any rate.

It's out there somewhere in the snow and the darkness... Lurking and waiting...Why, it's... it's...

The Abominable Snow Pup!
Waiting for his girlfriend the little lab from next door. Sorry buddy, she ain't comin' out to dance tonight.

I've never been particularly good about making sure I start with the same amount of fiber for each spindle and this time I wound up with an unconscionable amount of single left on one spool. This lead to searching for information about an Andean plying bracelet which I found here and that led to this which looks like a mess around my wrist, but which in fact is such a plying bracelet and worked perfectly.

This was actually my second attempt at the technique and having succeeded once, I had to get fancy. The red/white/blue had been done as a three ply and for whatever reason, I had run out of one bobbin altogether and had about half as much on the second bobbin as the third. So, I did a bracelet with the long single and plied it together with the short which worked out very nicely as far as singles length went but I will say that three plying using a bracelet for two of the plies and a single from another bobbin rather calls for having three or four hands for tensioning purposes instead of just two. I suppose it would get easier with practice but the experience didn't leave me with the burning desire to run out and get more practice so I'm not sure it will get any easier. It was, however, successful. The red/white/blue is done and I get to move on (back) to other things, like plying the silk and angora and plying the wild raspberry and...

Having gotten to the jaguar, I realized that I never really finished collecting up threads for this project. I knew I was missing one of the oranges - the source of the little dots left here and there in the upper portion of the head. I didn't realize I was missing all four of the greens for the eyes. Those I went and collected today.

While looking through the bag o' threads to decide which ones I had vs. needed, I found a lavender-y purple. Why is that in there? I ask as I toss it back in the bag. I made my list of threads needed and trundled off to the local Jo-Ann's (chosen from the list of possibilites due to the need for ordinary sewing needles as well). I ran down my list of threads while pawing through the jumble of lazy susans with floss-on-sale. The last thread on the list, once I found it, was the lavender purple I had rejected without checking its number.

So, where exactly does lavender purple go on a jaguar?

The jaguar has finally moved somewhat beyond the stage of its last picture, and of today, we have the sketches of eyes. This is important, because just beyond the eyes is the halfway point of the piece. It will be several days work to finish up just to the eyes, however.

Working over-one, I find it important to observe little niceties of stitching that I sometimes like to ignore in stitching over-two. It's not that it isn't important in stitching over-two, it just doesn't make as visible a difference. One is that it is important that all stitching moves in the same direction - start at the top and work down or start at the bottom and work up but don't change direction.

Another is that when stitching over one, it makes a huge difference for me if I stitch a row of stitches (all the same color) one half at a time and then return stitching the other half. Much neater tidier work. Oddly enough, this is not true with stitching over two. Then I do tidier work stitching one complete stitch at a time. Based on comments from others when this was discussed in a stitchery forum, many people find this dichotomy to be true, thus proving (again) that when taking or giving advice, it's necessary to be very careful you know what the basis one is working from.

A third thing that helps is making sure that one's thread is not too long. This may sound simplistic, but every time you start or stop a thread, you have to worry about the process of doing so. Repeatedly threading one's needle gets on some people's nerves. And WASTING THREAD is the bugaboo of some people's lives. I've seen people explain at great length the contortions that they go through to preserve a piece of ripped thread for re-use.

I'm sorry people, life's too short. Thread has a maximum number of passes through fabric before it visibly frays. This maximum number is based on how rough the fabric is, how close together the holes are and how many other stitches have already passed through that hole. I'm using 1/6th of a section of floss, cut in approximately 15 inch lengths. Floss comes 6 yards at a time and costs between 30 and 50 cents per hank. I use short lengths, and if it tangles or goes wrong and has to be ripped, I get a new piece.

The last thing that's true about stitching over-one really applies to any counted stitchery: Count and count and count again. Right now, at the bottom of the left hand side, there's another run of black stitches that needs to go down about 15 or 20 stitches. I'm tempted to just keep going with black, finish it off and be done with that color. I won't do it though - past experience tells me I'm going to get burnt if I do.

Counting for counted cross stitch works much better when you can count in two dimensions. When a new run starts down out into unexplored territory, it works much better if you can triangulate your work so that it has been count checked in both horizontal and vertical space. For example, when I started the left eye, I positioned it based on the orange bit just above it. As soon as absolutely practical, I confirmed its position by counting sideways to the bit coming down the nose. The bit extending south of the left eye is now confirmed only in one dimension. Any further extensions past that point are past my comfort zone for one dimensional exploration. It doesn't sound like much, but it means quite a lot when you get down farther later on and discover that one dimesional exploration was one stitch over and two stitches too long. How much other stuff have you got based on it by then that now has to be ripped?

Cross stitch is not particularly a creative outlet for me. I love doing it, but it's all about precision and following a pattern and making it look right. There's a part of me that is very satisfied with tweaking the surroundings of a pattern to make it mine and then being able to go with the flow that someone else has prepared. I used to do ccs during my break when I was working at one software company. My program manager one day asked me why, and I told him I enjoyed it because it was a lot like programming - very precise, very neat, and often very detailed. It was better than programming because I never had to rework it based on changing requirements.

I've noticed that I go back to doing ccs when other parts of my life are chaotic, with ever changing demands on my time.

So. 2005 is gone and 2006 stretches before us. "Resolution" time. The only problem with that is that I made all the resolutions I wanted to about 2 months ago and now the only resolution left to make is to get myself back on schedule tomorrow. The relatives have been visited, the tree is coming down today, the kids and the husband head back to their respective places and I need to get my butt in gear to finish Homework 3 and Project Section 1 before next week Monday when class resumes.

The house is somewhat cluttered with the debris of the past two weeks, but all in all I have hopes for the next month. The biggest thing that happened in the past few weeks is the acquisition of new storage units. The book shelves are put together and the books are out of the boxes in the dining room and into the shelves. This left room available for the dining table to actually go into the dining room and the china cabinet to go as well. There are 3, count them, 3 drawers in the cabinet, which is wonderful as, while I love the new kitchen, the only thing it really lacks is drawer space. I knew I didn't want a desk, I wanted cabinet space but I let them overrule me, and now I'm paying for it. The only real point of the desk was to have a place for a phone and when they screwed up and didn't put in the phone jack, well, whachergonnado.

My sister was a sweetie and turned me loose in the local spinning/yarn store to pick out my present. I waved her toward their specialty shelves and said anything there would be just dandy. So I now have a bump of merino/bombyx and two bits of flash to play with. I hadn't ever seen the flash in person - it's fun stuff. I have to get her a spindle to play with. I check out their bumps and recommended one for a beginner to try. All she needs is a decent spindle to start with. I'm sorry, but I don't recommend an Ashford boat anchor for beginning. Oh, Sheila...

It's snowy outside but beginning to rain and I doubt by tomorrow that there's be much white left. It's been a white Christmas for once but the better part of our snow season lies ahead of us, not behind. (The year we moved to Rochester, it was 60 F the day John arrived on 2 Jan. The next day it turned cold and it snowed for 34 days in a row after that.)

The rest of the day is going to be cloudy and flat, to end in rain, but it started out with a bang.

Merry Christmas.

Ice under snow - I hate it. That rain we had on frozen ground last week? It's still there. Today was the first day we haven't had new snow. In fact, today was the first day it crept above 30 F. So of course, today the newer snow is melted into the ice, but there wasn't enough heat to truly melt the ice or make it let go. I just love skating up the drive into the garage.

Now, this is an excellent example of why children should have two or more adult figures in their lives. It rained yesterday after having been below freezing for several days. Rain + frozen ground = ice. About a quarter inch or more of ice before it got cold enough in the air for the snow to fall on top of the ice. About 7:45 pm, K&S started dashing about madly - where's my coat, where's my hat, MOM help me with my snowpants. Where are you going? I inquired. We're going Sledding! I need my SNOWPANTS!

It would never have occurred to me to think of going sledding on ice in the dark with rain still coming down 45 minutes before get-ready-for-bedtime on a school night. Had a child requested permission of me to do so the answer would have been a resounding NO. And yet, if I am honest, my response would have been fundamentally based on: It's cold, dark, rainy, slippery and _I_ am not going out there to supervise. Daddy suggested it, Daddy was willing and eager to participate, Daddy and the juvenile members of the household had a blast. The 20-something neighbor came out and joined them. Mommy stayed inside and eventually made hot chocolate and herbal tea to lure them inside again with. They were warmly dressed, the heirloom sleds they just received from Grandad at T-day got a great workout, their coats dried overnight. They were only a few minutes late going to bed, and they have a memory that will stick with them for a long time. Much more of an event than Mom would have arranged.

The dog was exhausted last night. I am quite, quite sure that a mouse moved into the garden sometime recently. We covered the bed with fallen leaves to compost down over the winter. Deep bed of leaves, endless supply of birdseed from the feeder - what more could any little mousie want - aside from that pesky dog tearing up the neighborhood.

Brandon spent the better part of 3 hours turning over the leaves at the base of the birdfeeder and got quite short with me when I suggested it was time to come in.


I got quite a bit done on my Braids cardigan this week. The charcoal grey Lamb's Pride does not photograph well, but I've finished the back and am almost to the adjustment for the neckline on the fronts. I'm going both fronts at once, and since the whole thing is done seamlessly, I'm sure you can imagine the tangle that two fronts and two skeins of yarn can get into with the finished back lolling about.

I bought a fleece last week and have been waffling about how to deal with washing and processing. It's a merino and I just hate dealing with the amount of lanolin involved. On the other hand, I really don't want a merino overprocessed. Decisions, decisions.

Anybody know a processor who's really good with fine fleeces?



Tiger thinks K's angora is extremely munchalicious. She's going to have to guard this one. K is finding the prep to be wonderful to spin and has a bobbin already to go.







The newest spindle lost a chunk at guild. I was very sad. A moment of silence will now be held.

A large piece of the chip was found about 15 feet away, but a smaller piece wasn't located. Dunno yet what I'm going to do about that. Superglue for the large piece, yes, but then what?

Ok, never mind. I understand exactly why "girls" now. I haven't seen such a catty, gossipy, self-centered and greedy bunch since high school. Not all of them, but several. At least I know which ones to try to talk to next time.

Spinning guild meeting today and it was fun - holiday fiber gift exchange. Everyone (who wants to) brings 8 oz (or so) of prepared fiber, wrapped and unlabeled, and puts their name in a hat. As each person's name is drawn, they pick a present from the table, or that someone else has already drawn. If your present is stolen, you pick another present. When everyone in that round is through stealing presents, another person's name is drawn. Obviously, if you have your eye on a particular present, being drawn last is a benefit. This does not lend itself to finishing quickly: 39 presents took 1:10 to finish down to final distribution. I didn't count the longest stealing chain this year; last year's longest was 8 but I'm sure we beat that record this year.


Katy went with me, as she's now a member under the "family membership" plan I went with this time (I figure, if she's been to guild more than half the meetings this year, she ought to be a member). She wanted a particular present in blue shiny wrap and stole it 7 or 8 times only to lose it at the last minute. Oh, well. I do not feel too sorry for her - her gift was a lovely angora/wool roving. Which, coincidentally, was exactly what was in the blue gift she originally tried for. My gift contained llama and wool, which I was very pleased with, but which I can't photograph worth a darn in the dark. Maybe next time.

I needed a gift for a "girl's grab bag" at a party we're going to this evening. (Aside: Why on earth is a woman in her fifties referring to herself and other adult women as "girls"? It took me the longest time to grasp that when the invitation said "girl's grab bag" she meant ourselves, not our daughters. Anyway.) I walked in to guild and Wendy was selling hand made sushi soap. I love it. If whoever gets it doesn't, they'll just have to give it back to me.

Yes, I know. Blogging always make me appear as though I had the attention span of a gnat. (hush, back there)

The problem is, there's all kinds of time available: Time when nobody is home and I don't have schoolwork or housework to do and can curl up with an audiobook and just knit or spin. Time when I have kids taking a half-hour music lesson and it's a twenty minute drive home-and-back that I'm not about to make. Time when I am co-leading a Girl Scout troop and I'm not on deck for the next ten minutes. Time when there's something interesting (nova? car race?) on that J wants to watch and I can curl up on the sofa with him but don't really need to watch the tv but I am paying attention.

Basically it breaks down into: 1. Time when I need something quick and simple that I can ditch at a moment's notice. 2. Time when I can work on something for longer periods but not so complicated that paying attention to something else for a few minutes is going to make me completely forget where I was and 3. Time when I can work on something complex and not have to worry about interruptions.

So, I wind up with multiple projects - one or more for each kind of time. (Although,I hate it when I have more than one for category 3. Those projects are usually months long at a time as it is - trying to rotate between them makes me insane[er than usual]).

This is currently a category 1. The EZ Stonington shawl is not difficult, at least in the center square, and is currently small enough to be ditched with very little notice as long as I get the needles pushed well through, and yes, I didn't do that at the drs. yesterday and spent 20 minutes putting it back on the needles and fixing dropped-and-run stitches.

It may wind up as a category 2 later on through sheer size, but that'll be ok except that I already have a category 2 (due to size) and then they'll be competing for time. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof - perhaps by then that category 2 will have moved into category 3 - knitted lace edging, only to be done with the pattern posted in front of me, my feet propped up and the headphones on.

This was one of those unintentional projects. K wanted to spin something, preferrably the Wild Raspberry targhee I had bought for myself I ordered her some. It didn't come and it didn't come. We went to Fingerlakes Fiber Fest (a lovely little fiber fest put on by our local guild) and she bought some red/white/blue stuff which is possibly Romney. Not bad stuff for a beginner to spin, except just ever so slightly felted and stiff from the dye job. Just enough to make it annoying to spin, rather than enjoyable. So, a week later when her wild raspberry targhee arrived, I inherited the red/white/blue stuff.

It is slightly annoying to spin. Particularly on a spindle where I don't have two hands to draft, at least, not in the way I want to draft. It's slightly grabby stuff, so it doesn't want to draft consistently. So, instead of a 2 ply on the spindle, I'm 3 plying it on the wheel. It's faster this way and when dealing with annoying stuff, faster is good.

J was taking pictures with the camera and caught Snowball in mid meyawn. He then went on to take all the cats' pictures - Bitsy in grey and rather indifferent and Tiger demonstrating why one doesn't get red-eye when taking cat pictures.

It's winter time in western NY, on the shores of Lake Ontario. With lake effect snows, of course. We are just close enough to get some lake effect here, although the other side of the bay gets much more. Feed the birds, anyone?

We lost the trees in our backyard last winter and took them down this summer. That doesn't seem to have discouraged the downy woodpecker(s)we had last year though.

It seemed there was always a downy out there, everytime I looked. Then one day, I looked at just the right time and realized there were at least 3 downies around; 2 M and 1 F. They were all there in the tree at the same time for once.

It's a very odd thing. I have about 17 or 18 blogs that I follow on a regular basis. I've had them in a stack in my favorites of my browser. No, not everyone updates everyday or even every other day, but it took about 15 or 20 minutes to check each one manually. I finally updated to letting bloglines tell me which ones had changed since yesterday. Total time spent checking my blog list? About 30 seconds.

And somehow, that leaves me very flat. Exactly the same amount of new material, much less time spent on it; sort of like biting into a non-fat, no-calorie, no-taste croissant. No substance at all.

The most recent of the spindle spinning on the Lollipops. One strand angora fluff spun from top and two strands denim blue silk top. I have about twice or three times as much silk as angora, so it's becoming two ply silk when I run out of angora.

I'm not sure what any of this is going to become - partly it depends on the yardage I wind up with. How many yards can 2 oz angora and 4 oz silk turn into?

The angora is being spun on the CA Poppy spindle, and the silk is being spun on the snowflake spindle. I'm just eyeballing the amount on each spindle and since the angora is thicker in the strand than the silk is, I wind up with more silk than angora, which doesn't bother me (as noted above). The silk strands came out within inches of each other, so I guess the eyeballing is working for my purposes.

The other spindle is a newly acquired butterfly spindle from Quantum Spindles in ambrosia maple. It is lighter than it would seem at first appearances, which sort of threw me off when I first got it. It's going to be interesting to see what a full cop is on this one since I'm starting with a thinner grist than I would on another spindle I have of this size but heavier.

Chili and further commentary on the cross stitch

Ok, the chili is on, doing it's thing. I won't be here at dinner fixing time (long story, never mind) and I won't be here at pre-dinner fixing time, hence the need for the crock pot to do its thing.

Chili

1 pound ground beef
1 pound ground lamb
1 can stewed tomatoes with italian seasoning whirred up in the blender with 1 can (8oz )tomato sauce
12-14 oz beef broth
1 can red kidney beans
2 or 3 T ancho chili powder
1/2 tsp cumin
1/4-1/2 tsp chipotle chili powder

Brown meats, drain grease, cook in crockpot on high for 3-4 hours til tasty.
Serve with cornbread.

Commentary on cross stitch.
What I meant to add earlier before I interrupted myself was: It's white Lugana, 25 stitches to the inch, using Q-snaps for stretchers, with the obligatory dime for comparison. Not that the dime is really discernable, but you get the idea.

It's been a long time since I did any work on the jaguar. I'm starting to get wistful comments on it "do you think you'll ever finish it?" The problems of working on things that you wouldn't actually want to do if someone else didn't want them. But that is a gift, yes? Giving somebody something they want instead of what you want?


So I'm back to cracking the whip on myself - gotta get it done. And no, kid, it isn't going to be finished for Christmas or your birthday. Just sometime. And I will keep working on it. One of those things I've promised myself to keep plugging away at. But where have all my handsewing scissors gone?

Eek. The time, the time. Crockpots are wonderful, but not if you don't give them enough time to do their magic.