that's what friends are for

When I heard KnitWithSnot was spending her birthday helping with a school group visit to the Farm of Wonder, I knew what I had to do. Assemble some secret ingredients...

and bake her a cake. But not just any cake. The absolute most perfect cake for someone who's snot-covered, pig wrangling, charity knitting (and sewing!), zombie slaying, alpaca intern, at home on The Grange and more...all washed down with Roman Coke (there's a story there, you don't need to know it).

Oooh, this was really going to be the absolute most perfect cake. Really. Truly. I mean, rum and Coke? In a cake? BRILLIANT!

Or it would have been. If the damn thing hadn't bonded, like Zombie Prom Date Knitters, with the pan. I'd oiled it and floured it and let the cake cool slightly and ran a knife around the edges to loosen, gently turned it over on the serving plate and...nothing. I shook it. Still nothing. Shook it harder. No deal. Dropped the inverted cake in pan on plate combo a few inches to the counter. Nope. Dropped the inverted cake in pan on plate combo a foot to the floor (linoleum being slightly softer than Formica--yes, I have a shitty kitchen--and maybe not so much risk of breaking my plate). Nada. Beat that f***er with the handle of a butter knife. YES!

Uh. Sorta. Approximately half the cake was on the plate. The other half was still in the pan. So I did what any resourceful Zombie Prom Date Knitter/baker would do. I carefully peeled the rest of the cake out of the pan and glued it all back together with rum.

Rum makes everything better. It was perfect fine.

still unanswered

It always comes up. Always. At some point in the wheel VS spindle discussion. Uh, why do we always have wheel VS spindle discussions anyway? It's not a competition. Spindles are so much more than the gateway drug to wheels. They are totally cool spinning tools in their own right. But it always comes down to wheels are faster and have greater capacity than spindles. Eh. In many (but not all) circumstances, wheels can be faster. It's not likely I would have had the total amount of finished lace weight yarn to cast on my Print o'the Wave on Tuesday, if I hadn't had a wheel to spin it on when I remembered on Friday that I needed it. Capacity? Now that's another thing altogether.

Can my wheels hold more yarn than my spindle? Let's put it to the challenge.

Since I've already been working on some singles, we'll use those.

P-man walked by several times as I was working on this. "Will all of that fit?" He was a little skeptical.


Of course it will! It got a little messy toward the end but that was mostly because I spun a bit more to add to a bobbin that ran out early and then a bit more in a center pull ball to replace two of the bobbins that ran out separately. The spindle (.98 ounce, 3.5" whorl, 9" shaft below) could totally hold a few more ounces. I don't know how well my shoulder would hold up.



Though the singles--in thirds--would easily fit on my Joy's (standard Ashford) bobbins, there's no way the plied yarn would.



My Victoria's bobbins are about the same size as the Joy's so no help there. We need to go bigger. The old Ashford Scholar Holly's dad Marty gave us has HUGE bobbins. I've plied two (probably not quite full) Joy bobbins easily onto the Scholar (though the ratios--the bobbin ends are the whorls--aren't really comfortably high enough for lace so it requires treadling like a hamster)



So I wound my plied yarn onto the Scholar.



Which filled the bobbin to the whorl edges but still left visible space between the yarn and the flyer. Wugh. The question remains unanswered. For now.

How to spend your weekends

If it's cold and raining and you're recovering from a mini plague, the best thing to do is pack up all your fibery stuff and whichever members of your family are stupid brave enough to join you and take it on the road to sit outside on your friend's alpaca farm (see? I don't really even need to blog this stuff, just send you off to linkland) giving spinning and wool combing demos all day. Really, it's the best.

Unless you're up for digging out the old prom dress (or the dress you wore to your husband's posh employee Christmas party a million years--and pounds--ago, which was most recently worn by your daughter to her prom), sensible shoes and handknits for the first annual (oh, we are soo doing this again, probably sooner than next year) Zombie Prom Date Knitter's Zombie Slayers Prom.
more here
and here
because I'm so lame I didn't bring a camera, again

Some of your best friends + prom dresses, shovels and knitting + fantastic lunch, coffee, ice cream sundae + Zombieland = BEST FUN EVER

Unless you're suckered into more spinning and wool combing demos by The Girl Who Knows (and is somehow related to) Everyone on yet another cold (but not rainy, yay!) Saturday at the Vicksburg, MI Historical Society's Fall Harvest Festival. "I think we're the old-timey craft demos," said Holly. It really was a whole lotta fun, well, except for the part where my kid Em was really, really sick (102.5 temp when we finally got home to a thermometer) but refused to stay home and looked like zombie girl huddled in a camp chair covered in blankets. Next time, mom rules.

Huh, seems everyone else has taken to the lazy...I can't find a blog to link. What kind of friends are you people? Oops, I did find a few photos. Rebecca's camera is as evil as Snot's.
Note to self: if you forget your own camera, you've no ability to crop out your own ass.

hell yes, I'm making yarn!

3-ply, light worsted (?) romeldale
Originally uploaded by Spinsanity

Remember the Romeldale? All that lovely yummy dark chocolate I've been combing? I've also been spinning. Very cool to comb a bunch, pull it off the combs into a length and take it straight to the spindle! I think I may have scared a few people taking my combs out in public yesterday. Holly made a show of scooting her chair away and LuAnn set my iced tea on the table very carefully from the side away from where I was pulling the combed top off.

Anyway, even as I spun, I wasn't sure what I was spinning for. Seems like everything is "for lace" with me these days. Because lace is easy and this should be special somehow, I decided to spin a little heavier. Two ply fingering? Could still be lace. But Elizabeth observed that it looked like squishy cables to her.

I've wanted to do a true 3 ply on my spindles (actually, don't think I've done a true 3-ply--VS Navajo/chain ply--even on a wheel). So 3-ply it is. So far, 6.8 ounces (it's drying so haven't checked WPI or yardage), which I've just realized I'll never be able to fit on my ball winder. Wugh. I'm getting quite a bit of waste in combing so I don't know how much 3-ply I'll end up with from the 2 lbs of raw fleece. I'm saving the waste to card and plan to spin it...lace weight, of course.



Dave update: In case you missed my tweet yesterday--Saw the burn doc for the first time in two weeks...no skin grafts scheduled...Nurse Mom is kicking ass with the bandages--WOOT!

are you making yarn?

I'm sick. I thought it was the Back to School plague that I somehow pick up from whatever bugs the kids bring home when school starts back up. Then I remembered the woman hacking up a lung or two in Walgreen's entry while I was paying for two boxes of 4x4 gauze for Dave's dressing changes. She was so loud, even behind the inner doors, that I was startled. But then I wasn't even thinking of her sitting on the bench out there as I went out to my car, passing through the sealed space of death. Woke up two days ago coughing, wheezing, hurt all over.

So. I'm the only one who knows how to do Dave's dressing changes. We never factored in sick days. I'm showering before I go over, wearing a mask (that I can't breathe through) and scrubbing up repeatedly once I'm there. Cut off the old dressing, send him to the shower and then I hang out on his front porch until he calls me to wash the parts he can't reach. Usually I pretend to read, my head's too clogged up to actually read. Today, I took my spindle.

I started out sitting down but his porch is raised up and the height tempted me. I realized I could stand next to the railing and spin off the side as long as I leaned against the railing. I got into a groove--good strong snap, draft, draft, draft a few yards, butterfly wind on my hand, wind on, repeat. I saw the (young, thuggy-looking) man walking down the sidewalk the first time. Our eyes met.

"Hi, howyadoin'?"

"Good," I croaked. Still spinning. I must have totally zoned out and didn't see him come back down the sidewalk from the opposite direction.

"Hey, are you making yarn?"

I jumped. He apologized. I smiled.

just the right thing

I once insisted that stinky raw fleece would never, ever follow me home--I was a clean, prepared fiber gal all the way. If you've been following along, you'll know that Em and I have purchased huge bags of Shetland from the trunk of a car in a a dark parking lot. We've brought home Caeser's eight pound corriedale fleece from a Spinner's Flock fleece fair. Eight and a half pounds of various raw alpaca blankets. A couple of llama fleeces from Llamafest. Another alpaca blanket from Michigan Fiber Fest last year. A Finn/Targhee lambs fleece via USPS. A handful of dirty, dirty Wensleydale from The Spinning Loft (Beth tried her hardest to talk me into processed or, at least, washed). I dunno what happened. Really, I don't.

I bought a drum carder to deal with all this fleece. Oddly, I haven't used it all that much. I prefer sitting here, usually at my desk, combing through small amounts at a time with a couple of metal dog combs. There's just something about combing that feels...magical. Opening up the clumped locks into soft fluff--like unwrapping little gifts. I kept thinking, in the back of my mind, that I really needed to look into getting some real combs one of these days.

When Andrea, of Wonder Why Alpaca Farm, mentioned she had fleece from some of her suri alpacas that was too long or too variegated in color for professional processing, I jumped in with the offer to see what I could do with it. I washed some from the first bag...Buccaneer's l-o-n-g cream and med brown.

Far too long for the drum carder. Really too much for my dog combs. This would be so much easier if I could get my hands on some real combs. Combs? Andrea asked. I have combs! A friend had loaned her some monstrous 5 pitch Indigo Hound combs pics at the bottom). And she loaned them to me.

So we played with some of Buccie's fleece. And then I tried out some of Caeser's corriedale. Absolutely what that fleece was waiting for all this time! But those combs really are monstrous. They're heavy and hard on my hands. I tried a bit of the lamb's fleece and it was too short stapled for the five pitch. My lovely Romeldale (two pounds, my only purchase at this year's MI Fiber Fest)

was too fine for them, too much of the staple was caught up in the rows of tines as waste. I started researching combs, even though I'm not in a position to buy any right now. I just wanted to be prepared in case of sudden turn around in circumstances or a relative offering Christmas gift of my choice (ha! like that would happen?). Anyway, after much reading, I finally settled on Valkyrie 2 pitch mini combs (which were out of production for 5 years or so but he'd just started back up). I even signed on to his mailing list to be notified when the 2 pitch combs were in stock again.

And then, Andrea said she'd like the combs back when the kids went back to school so she could give them a try. I spent one night combing Corriedale until 4 AM. The next day, as I caught up on email, I was sad to see that someone had offered some Indigo Hound combs and an Indigo Hound II It "free to a good home" (she didn't like combing and they were rusting with disuse) on Spindler's yahoo list. Wugh. I'd been combing, combing, combing and totally missed it. I was so bummed that I actually sent her an email:

Well, darn. While you were posting this offer, I was frantically using some Indigo Hound combs that I borrowed and need to return in a couple of days. A week just wasn't long enough to learn how to use combs and then actually comb everything I wanted to. And I missed your offer.

Good luck with the deluge of mail you've probably gotten. Sorry for adding to it, lol.

The next morning, I found this in my in box:

No, Shannon, you got in just under the wire and you are the winner for
the set of Indigo Hound combs.

Please send me your snail mail information.

She'd thrown all the responses in a hat and drew mine for the combs. How cool is that? Seriously. I wondered if they might be the very same monstrous combs I was borrowing from Andrea but I wasn't going to ask for details. They were a gift! She told me she'd get them in the mail as soon as the holiday (Labor Day) passed and I'd have them by the weekend. So exciting...

And then, I totally forgot about them as the kids went back to school that Tuesday and with Dave's accident early that Wednesday. Thoughts of fiber and combs and spindles and spinning were replaced with ICU, ventilator, life support, degree of burns, percentage of burns.

Finally, when Dave was doing better and I needed to finish up some of the spindles I'd been working on for that "emergency spindle order," I remembered the package. And I could not believe what was inside...

Not Indigo Hound combs as I expected but the very same 2 pitch Valkyrie mini combs I had decided on. These, from his original run. I don't know what kind of craziness it was that brought all of this together but it's just so full of awesome. Thank you, Veryl. Thank you so very much. Stealing some time to comb my lovely Romeldale with your absolutely perfect for it combs has been exactly what I needed. Just the right thing.

dear little brother

You are not being left out of the loop if I don't call you direct to tell you the same damn things I told Mom and asked her to pass on--that you've already heard because you called her to complain that I wasn't returning any of your twenty seven calls.

He's doing well, considering. No skin graft surgery this week (yay!). Dressing changes are a bitch. I'm busy. I'm tired. Yes, the economy sucks. No, I don't have any extra money you can borrow.

Dude. You are forty-something years old. Isn't it about time you man up like the rest of us?