Making Stuff, Weeks 14, 15, and 16: Whew.

So I swore I’d never skip a week of making stuff this year, but I’ve got a good excuse. In fact, the excuse is that I have been making something, it just doesn’t have anything to do with yarn, alpacas, or fiber. As I’ve mentioned the last couple of posts, we’ve been busy at Uber Entertainment finishing up Monday Night Combat, which means we’re all putting in some crazy long hours, which doesn’t leave me much time for spinning right now but that’s a temporary thing. The time spent on the game has been more than worth it as we’ve seen it go from a-really-good game to whoa-this-is-a-really-awesome game. I’m not out of the crunch-time woods yet but I did manage to sneak in about one accumulated hour of fiber time this week to do some fibery things.

But first! I finished Duet!

The Finished Duet, a combo hat or scarf, your choice.

I’m very pleased with it. To recap, the yarn is my own handspun that’s comprised of about fifty percent alpaca from my boy Silverton, and then blended with Merino wool that I dyed myself in two shades of green and some 80/20 Merino/silk blend in white. I was going for a sage green when blending and boy, did I hit the color I wanted. I’m amazed at how lovely this color is. I took notes and fiber samples so I can reproduce it later, and I ended up spinning about twice as much as I needed for the Duet. I’m trying to decide if I want to keep the yarn and knit another one (or something like it) or sell the yarn.

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Two and a Half Years of Belly Dance (So Far)

Nearly every girl my age growing up was into some kind of graceful display of athleticism. For some — and it seemed most — it was gymnastics. I think I might have been the only girl in my little world who had no interest in gymnastics whatsoever, no matter how much my friends gushed about how awesome it was or how great they were at it. For other girls it was ballet, and those girls seemed born to wear a cute little pink leotard. I had two things going against me when it came to this stuff — the first was that I was ungraceful, ungainly, and clumsy. Looking back at pictures of me as a kid I wasn’t particularly big, but I was always taller than other girls my age and always felt like a giant compared to them. I was forever tripping over my own two feet.

The second was that I was a raging tomboy. My grandmother tried in vain to get me to wear dresses as a kid but I’d have nothing to do with them. I have a distinct memory of telling my dad once, when I was around five years old, that I wished I was a boy because boys got to do way more fun things and had cooler toys. Looking back, I remember the pained expression on his face as I think he wondered exactly what kind of daughter he was going to be dealing with as she grew up.

So it’s a little weird that decades later in my late thirties I’d have any interest at all in dance, something that not only didn’t interest me for most of my life but actually bored me. But when I moved out here in 2007 I needed something physical to do and literally on a whim I thought, “belly dance. Sure, that sounds fun.” I figured I’d take the eleven-week class I saw advertised at the local fitness place, probably hate it, and never go back again. I’d never been exposed to belly dance. I’d never seen a belly dance show. I had no cultural or ethnic ties to any regions in which belly dance is prevalent. My knowledge of it was limited to exotic costumes and crazy shimmy moves, but I figured that if there was one thing I had in abundance it was hips and that I may as well put them to some good use.
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Making Stuff, Week 13: A Spinning Break

Another Friday, and another entry for WonderWhyGal’s Fiber Arts Friday! We’re coming in for the landing at work on our project (Monday Night Combat – don’t forget to check it out!) so my time is limited for a little while. And when I don’t have much time to spin or knit I pick my projects carefully to maximize my sense of accomplishment in a short amount of time. So instead of doing any spinning this week I took a little break and decided I needed to do some knitting with my own handspun, a nice, small project that I could take to work and get done quickly. And since I had spun my Silverton Sage yarn for just such a project, I went ahead and cast it on.

Silverton Sage being knit into the Duet hat/scarf from Knitty.com.

So far I’m pretty happy with it. I do have a couple of criticisms of my work, however — first, I overspun the yarn just every so slightly. I got a little overzealous, I think, in wanting a bouncy 3-ply yarn, and I probably should have run it back through the wheel to unwind it a little bit, but honestly it’s not that bad. Second, I’m wondering if a 2-ply yarn would have worked better for this stitch pattern. The general rule of thumb is that if you’re knitting with cables or any other textured stitch that needs to pop, you use a 3-ply, and for any lace pattern you use a 2-ply. This pattern has no cables but it struck me as not quite lacy enough to qualify as lace, so I chose a 3-ply. And it does look nice, I think, but part of me wants to make the same yarn in a 2-ply, knit the same pattern, and then compare. That’s not likely to happen but who knows? I just have a few more rows to do and it’s done, so I just need to pick up a couple of buttons and a ribbon to finish the whole deal.

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Making Stuff, Week 12: Silverton Sage

It’s one thing to be sick at home and at least be able to do some knitting or spinning. But you know you’re really sick when you’re an avid spinner or knitter and just the thought of picking up the needles or sitting at the wheel is enough to send your stomach into flips. That’s exactly where I found myself this week: Monday night I went to bed a perfectly healthy human, two hours later I woke up feeling like I was hit with the worst case of food poisoning I’d ever had. And that’s what I thought it was until twelve hours later when I was still, um, refreshing the contents of my digestive system, shall we say. Several times later.

Turns out I’d gotten a stomach virus, probably picked up while I was at the Cues & Tattoos festival in Seattle this weekend, surrounded by lots of people, many of whom had traveled. That’s knocked me out of commission pretty well this week, so much so that it felt like the last three days just kind of fell into a time chasm: one minute I’m perfectly fine and the next minute it’s April, I’ve got forty-nine unread emails, and I’ve done nothing but watch Animal Planet. Thanks, stomach virus. Food and I are only just getting back on speaking terms today, three days later, and even that’s still a rocky relationship.

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