Huh?... How Did That Happen

How do two days pass you by in a blinding rush... One day it was Friday and then all of a sudden it was Sunday night and I'm wondering how the heck I got here....

OK lets see... it has been a really busy weekend.... I'm planning a party for next weekend... it's a party for one of my guild members who is moving away and I'll probably never see her again..... waaaah!

I had service this morning at church and that came off very well considering that the organist was not able to be there.... we used taped music....

I spun and wrote and tabulated and respun and labeled all day yesterday on homework for the level 3 of the Master Spinners..... it's all going according to plan.... tonight I will have one third finished..... woo hoo... then it is back to the big j.c..... two weeks to finish it.

Then Hubby has been butchering and shearing lambs all weekend.... I sold the fleeces right away.... how did that happen you ask? Well I advertised them to my guild members.... and that was that, in three minutes flat.... I had my fleeces sold. I have one tucked away for moi..... The ewe and ram fleeces will be available later in the spring.... I'm hoping they will sell just as fast.... but then you never know... I still have a few of last years fleeces roaming around in the shed. But I'll keep them for the mill. I helped Hubby label and grade the fleeces too.

I finished a bracelet and necklace for myself which I have been wanting to do for a while I still have a necklace for myself to finish.... it has a pendant that has a blade for cutting thread or yarn. Then I have the bracelet for a choker and bracelet set done I just ran out of strand to finish the choker.... I'll get some next time I'm in town....

So as you can see it has been a busy two days... Hubby just left to go to work. He will be working until late tonight which is odd since Hubby is a teacher and usually he works by day. But this is report card week so he will be working late each day until he is done. Daughter #1 is catching Daughter #2's cold and Daughter #2 is studying for a test tomorrow that she missed last week while she was home from school.

Spring is definitely in the air... the deck is clear of snow and everything is turning to ice in the driveway. There is only 3 weeks left before the spring equinox...it soon will be planting time.

I planted cotton seeds a while ago but they never did grow. I was really hopeful that I had something growing when a green shoot popped through the ground but it turned out to be a weed... no cotton... : ( but then what did I expect... we do live far too North for cotton to grow. Speaking of cotton .... I had better go spin some... and weave the last of my silk for my distaff....
That is if I want to be at the 1/3 mark.....

The Well Being Of All

It has been a bad morning for Daughter #1. She had a great time yesterday on the ski slopes but today she is suffering. Daughter #1 went skiing with the work ethics honour group and this is something she has never done before. She used muscles that she normally doesn't use. She is moving very slowly and frankly she is having a hard time not crying because it hurts so bad. Red eyes an swollen nose and she's walking like a zombie. I think she's really wanting a day home with Mom.... she ain't getting it!

Daughter #2 is in bed.... she has a snarky cold. She also has a red nose and red eyes.... but for different reasons. It's going around the school so they tell me. She has been home for two days but hopefully will be able to go back to school on Monday.

Duffy has a sore eye. I took her to the vet two weeks ago and he put her on steroids... then her face swelled up and it got so bad that she couldn't get her eyes open.... we took her off the steroids and her face started to go back to normal.... but when her face stopped swelling there was a huge lump over the bad eye.... I was just going to call the vet for an appointment again when she broke it open and out came a lot of disgusting pus.... obviously a misdiagnosis. So we are putting peroxide on it in an effort to clear up what ever infection was there.

Tootsie is fine. In serious ball crisis... since we were so irritated with him staring at us to play ball with him that he got his ball taken away till the snow melt and he can play outdoors.

The animals are all fine. The ewes are starting to have that pregnant look. I am expecting the first lambs in just over a month. Ahhh lambing season.

The cats..... well they're their usual irritating selves....

Hubby is fine.

Me too.

This post is entirely for the folks home who read solely just to catch up on how we all are.....

Tomorrow I should have a post about silk.....and how to spin hankies. I'm dyeing a bunch of them today...... if I can just find the vinegar..... hmmm... what the heck did I do with that stuff...

Life Long Learning

Sometimes things just work out.... don't you love it when that happens. Yesterday I didn't write here because I was nowhere near a computer. Hubby just happened to be going into FSJ for a day of workshops and there just happened to be a spinning day at the house of one of he guild members. I took Hubby up on the drive to the home of my friend where we conferred about the level 3 homework.... (we did this before heading to the home of the guild member who was having the spinning day).....she is doing her Master Spinner certification too. It is great having someone with whom you can bounce ideas around. I think she may go on to do her Master Weaver certification while I'll probably go looking for further spinning certification..... maybe the Australian certification which I have looked into.... who knows. All I know is that I want to be the best that I can be at spinning... that doesn't make me any better or any worse than anyone else it just makes me want to excel as much as I can in what I do. It's not that I want to be famous like Judith MacKensie McCuin, (although that wouldn't hurt) but I just want to feel like what I do is the best... so I strive and sometimes it is a kick in the pants when you finish a question and you know it can be better but you don't have time to go back and fool with it anymore. When I finished my level 1 homework I still felt that I could have worked on it some more to get it right. The same thing happened when I finished my level 2 homework.... and that one really ate at me since my mark was a .5 less than my low goal.... it truly frustrates when you work really hard and you don't even make your low goal.

This year my goal is to make 86 as my low goal and 95 my high goal.... and I already blew the high goal when I got a 88% in my classroom exam. My friend got 100% her first year to my 97% then she got 97% to my 89% in level 2 (I should have gotten higher than this but blew two questions with less than the 10 metre skeins required.... Mine were 8 and 9.5 metres respectively. It was my own fault because I should have remeasured my skeins after they were washed... as a result I got a big fat 0 for those two questions just because I handed in less than the required amount.... regardless of the fact that I should have gotten marks for the written part of the question) and we'll see what happens in level 3... hmmm... but 88% for the classroom test was not a good beginning. I hate knowing I lost marks due to some stupid mistake on my part. (On my test I had a brain freeze and said that 9 x 5 is 36 instead of 9 x 4 is 36.... see.... dumb eh?) Every time I lose marks it's because of stupid mistakes. That's why the other night I looked at my knitted sample and felt it wasn't good enough.... so I raveled it out and did a different sample.... I can't show pictures though since Hubby seems to have hidden his camera and mine had the batteries just die. The new knitted sample is awesome. I may redo my woven sample too.... I'm just not satisfied with it!

Spinning is like that..... you can spend an entire lifetime trying to make one sample perfect. But in the end time is the issue..... that is why I'm disappointed to say that after level 6 in the Olds Master Spinner program I will not be able to go further unless I go to some other spinning program. I really wish there was a Doctorate to earn in spinning.... I'd do it in an instant..... then I would be a Spin Doctor (har har... pun intended.... ). Really life long learning is cool and my thing is learning spinning.

The Olds program is awesome.... but the Olds program is finite. There are only 6 levels in the Master certification program..... I'm already at level 3, and 4 is looming.... yes I use the word looming not because I'm dreading it.... (although I study flax and linen this year and that is a little scary) but I'm dreading it because I am one step closer to being finished. (Boo hiss hiss!) Maybe I'll just register again for level 1 under a different name and go through the whole process again..... think they'll notice?!!

I think I could have been a permanent student..... My motto should be..... "Life Long Learning.... Boom Chakalakalaka!"

Anyway, as a result of yesterday's spinning day.... I've turned some people on to silk hankies which I was spinning. I will be spinning more today... and then I'm weaving them for a distaff.... It is looking..... well quite frankly WOW! I can't wait to finish it. And hopefully I'll have located the charger, charged my batteries and be able to post some pics here. Now what did I do with the silk hankies I pre-drafted last night.

Short Post

Today will be a short post as I really want to get some things done on my level 3 homework. Yesterday it took me all morning and part of the afternoon to get all the pictures from the weekend uploaded and on the blog. I am on dial up and it takes forever to upload pictures. So even though, I did get some work done on the level 3 homework, it's not as much as I wanted. I did some writing up for some of the questions that I have finished and I did some washing of my samples, so now I want to mount them and get on with two other questions that are in a bit of a limbo but would take very little work to finish them and I could have them done this week. The nice thing is that I surprisingly discovered that by the end of the week, with all my write ups done I will have 1/3 of my questions finished. And I thought I was getting nothing done! How quickly it all adds up. Next week though I will have to get back to the big j.c. Time creeps onward and there is no doubt that I want the Big j.c. done by the time mid March rolls around and the lady who commissioned it is back from South Africa. I screwed up the date the first time and I sure don't want to do that again. I also don't want to feel that kind of pressure ever again.

It is a foggy and very icky day today so a good day to stay in and work, work, work..... which is what I am off to do now.... Pops might come by later for a cup of tea so I had better get down to it....

Awesome Retreat

I am back from the Blueberry! What a great weekend..... I got lots done.... of course I didn't sleep hardly at all.... about 4 hours a night.... but that's ok because I had a blast!! I finished my mawata.... (I'll tell you all about that)... I finished my silk/cotton sample... (I'll tell you all about that)... I did a little toward my cotton on the Charkha sample.... (I'll tell you all about that).... and I started on my cabled yarn for my wrist distaff.... (I'll tell you all about that too)! Quite a bit of the work I did was for my level 3 homework, and I am starting to feel a whole lot better about that. The food was awesome and I was a little worried that I had gone easy in organizing the food and not had people bring enough...... yeah! right! like that is likely! These ladies never bring too little food. We eat like sheiks and we wouldn't do better aboard a cruise ship! We even had 4 cakes...(one was a birthday cake). You can't beat that! It was sunny and beautiful with excellent roads for traveling and I even sat out on the deck in short sleeves and NO SOCKS on Saturday and spun for a while. Except last year, (when I went to Victoria for a conference) I've been going to the Blueberry retreat for seven years. I love our annual Blueberry retreat.

I started work as soon as I got there hemming a shawl that I had woven last summer which I showed you pics of a while back. That didn't take long and so I then started working on my commercial silk hankies which are colourful and bright and a whole lot of fun to spin. I spun about six of them and then plied them, and then they were so fine that I thought a cabled yarn would be nice..... so I re-plied them so that there would be lots of energy in the yarn and then cabled them..... (this is probably too technical for you non-spinners but bare with me and I'll be talking about normal stuff in a little bit). I loved the cabled yarn from silk hankies
and suddenly I thought this would be great for my cabled yarn question for my level 3 homework...... I will talk some more about this in a little while.... One of the ladies who was at the retreat has been learning Chi Gong and so she took us all into the other room and taught us a little Chi Gong.... exercises are good when you eat lots and sit lots... laughing is good exercise.... but Chi Gong gets you up and moving. : )

I went to my room and pitched my sleeping bag and crashed with the full intention of sleeping well..... but..... that didn't happen.... by 4:48 a.m. I was wide awake and dying of thirst. Heat control is an issue at the Blueberry. The people who run the Blueberry lodge decided a few years ago to put in one of those huge wood heat systems where the fire box is in its own building and wow... can that produce heat. I have learned not to bring long sleeve anything with me because I just about die from the heat..... and drink..... I suck back huge quantities of water while there in an effort to stave off dehydration. I still come home with my lips chapped and skin itchy from dryness. Anyway.... in the middle of the night I had to go visit the water cooler and ended up drinking almost a litre of water. I did go back to sleep but not for very long before I heard people up and moving around so I got up too. There was a lady downstairs making coffee and boy was that stuff strong. Even with milk in it, it looked like tar..... but that wasn't a bad thing... after a night with very little sleep good strong coffee perks you up.

Saturday I decided to leave off spinning silk hankies.... I already had a nice bit done and I really wanted to work on my silk and cotton sample. I had chosen to use Supima combed cotton rovings and Bombyx silk rovings for my blend. Both of these fibres are the supreme top quality preparations, I think, for their fibre types. I was looking for a cotton yarn with and sheen almost like mercerized cotton. Well this took a little fiddling since when you blend, staple length is an issue and cotton is way shorter than Bombyx silk so with scissors in hand I cut the silk..... (believe me I had to cringe each time I snipped!) Then I weighed it and measured it to get a 50/50% blend. Then I tried combing it but that didn't work so I carded it with my Ashford all purpose/cotton cards.... and made punis.... (sorry to you folks who have no clue what I am talking about) I spun it with a point of contact drafting method and by the end of the day I had a fairly consistent 3 ply yarn.... which disappointingly had less sheen than I wanted.... that is, till the sun shone on it the next morning. This isn't a very god picture...

It is quite nice. Meanwhile while this was going on I cooked a ham for supper in the kitchen and made a blue mawata. One of my fellow Master Spinners students who is in level 3, had decided we should make a mawata while at the Blueberry and I was all for having company for this dastardly job. A mawata is a way of preparing silk from a cocoon for spinning. You have to boil water with washing soda and soap in it and then soak your silk cocoons until they soften and then pick out the worm and poop and then stretch the cocoon out over a square frame into a shape that looks like a hankie. My cocoons had been previously dyed blue in a mason jar on my deck in the summer sun a few years ago. So I have a blue mawata.
The whole process is a nasty job and though generally I'm not squeamish this is one job that totally disgusts me. The worm is bad enough but the poop is just plain gross! Anyway, I now have that done too. Once it was rinsed in water and vinegar I left it to dry.

After not sleeping much on Friday night I got pretty tired along around mid afternoon so I went and crashed for twenty minutes.... not long but long enough. When I came back downstairs... some of the ladies had moved to the deck to spin so I did too. It was simply divine to sit out in the sun after a long cold winter and spin and chat with no socks... it reminded me that I am so lucky to live in Northern Canada, and it reminded me that spring is coming, and it reminded me how good it is to have friends that you enjoy being with, and it reminded me of how nice bare feet are! There was a dog hanging out at the Blueberry..... I think he belonged to the caretaker and there was something so casual and satisfying about spinning in the sun... friends to chat with and dog by my side with a gorgeous view out over the valley, some might call it contentment.

Sunday started very early. I woke at 5 a.m. and remembered that I hadn't washed the shawl that I had hemmed on Friday night. I figured I had better do that. So I got up and washed a shawl long before anyone woke up and then I hung it out on the rail on the deck to drip.... the dog was there so we bonded for a few minutes and then I asked him not to lift his leg against my shawl... no worries there since he is a very well mannered dog. Later, I was showing my Charkha to anyone interested, when I realized that I had enough cotton spun in singles that I could use it for the sample I have to do on a Charkha or quill wheel. I just have to ply it today and I'm done.
For the rest of Sunday I spun jewel toned commercial silk hankies so I just need to finish that today as well, and do some writing... label it all and then mount it in my binder. I feel very satisfied that I worked well at the retreat and got lots done.

I really could have stayed another day but that was not to be..... when I got home I realized that the only person I never got pics of was the gal I traveled with.... how dumb.

So here are some pics from the weekend.....

We spun....

in the sun....



We wove....




We felted....


We knit and we chatted....

And worked....


We cooked....


We ate...




We partied..... and some of us were surprised......




And when all was said and done.... we left.... sadly.... to wait for another year.

Spring Is In The Air

I think, at least it seems to be mind you there are no flowers yet..... but the snow on the roof goes drip, drip, drip, everyday and I am starting to walk around during the day fully dressed without socks...... now that really says spring to me.

Yesterday I picked myself up again and had a lovely afternoon sitting here in the sunshine with a movie on (The Da Vinci Code) and some silk for spinning. The silk that I dragged out of my stash turned out not to be green undulating to purple but two separate batches of rovings.... green undulating to gold and purple undulating to beige..... I chose the purple and it turned out lovely though not quite as colourful as I thought. I finished my knitted sample last night and am now washing and blocking it. The skein is labeled and ready to go in the book. I am also setting in my book the woven sample from a few weeks ago...


I have the write up done but I didn't print it and actually put it into my binder so that will be one of my many jobs to do today. I also want to card rolags today with Bombyx silk and Pima cotton for the silk/cotton sample... I would like to do that sample over the weekend at the retreat.

Ah yes... the retreat...... Tomorrow I am headed off to the Blueberry for a short retreat. I will be spending the weekend in a log lodge north of FSJ overlooking a river (frozen) and spinning and laughing etc.... I am taking black alpaca for spinning for the big j.c., the Bombyx and Pima rolags if I can finish it today and silk coccoons for a mawatta. I will also take those damn lace gloves that I have been working on since Judas was in diapers. Who knows.... I might even get some of it done!

I have been in charge of food for the Blueberry retreat this year and am going to have to do some cooking today. Pub night on Friday night and no we won't be drinking.... just eating pub style food..... Breakfast is a whatever you can drum up affair.... Saturday lunch is soups and buns..... Saturday night is ham and scalloped potatoes..... Sunday is always a "must go" day..... The log lodge is a great place to have a retreat because they have individual rooms, showers ( a must), and a huge room in which to set up your spinning and weaving junk and spread out completely.

So I guess I had better get to it.

Silk And A Little Something

I started spinning Tussah silk a while ago for my silk knitted sample but last night I was tired of a colourless life after the last few weeks of black, and so I dug through my stash and found some nice green silk that undulates into a purple and I thought that's just the ticket. So this morning I got out my spinning wheel and got everything together for a day of spinning with colour (and shiny colour too)!

About five years ago I started having odd dizzy spells that really made me tired. I'd get them for two or three days and then it would clear up and leave me feeling a little tired but not really any the worse for wear.... after a while I was getting them so frequently that I thought a trip to the doctor was in order. He said that it wasn't anything serious, that it was an inbalance of fluid in my inner ear, and that there was nothing to do but wait them out and go on with life. Sunday morning I woke with my balance all screwed up and so I lay low for the day..... Monday wasn't a whole lot better..... Tuesday was better but not much.... today I am finally starting to feel a little better.... but at times like this I generally stay close to home and and don't stray far since driving with things spinning around you is not a great idea. So a day home with some silk to spin is just what I'm looking forward to.... if it gets sunny I will pick off the pocket on the big j.c. since black thread on a woolen fabric is not easy to see..... (a sign that I'm getting older ; 0)

Down time is what I have needed after beating myself out and up last week. I have been doing a little reading in the last few days... funny.... Daughter #2 has been reading youth books by an author of the name Sarah Dessen so in the interests of checking up on what the Daughters are reading these days, I picked up one of her books and read it. Actually it was quite good. A basic teen romance/find yourself kind of book..... typical of the books I got into when I was the same age. But even for an old gal (I've been feeling pretty old the last little while) these books have something to say (although the author does tend to put parents in a bad light generally)... it reminds you of how very difficult it is to find your place in the world and accept that you are not a princess and may never be famous..... and that is ok. After I read the first one I thought maybe I'll read another.... and that one was good too.... same message just in a different package. It's kind of nice to have a reminder that you can fall down and it is ok just so long as you pick yourself right back up and keep on going....

I'd forgotten that...

So silk today and who knows what tomorrow will bring....