A Proposal at Haystack Rock.

Matt and I took a trip to Cannon Beach, Oregon this past week, something that we had been dying to do for a while but really had to plan carefully — I’ve been in crunch working on Monday Night Combat and didn’t know exactly when we’d be out of that time period when all of us would be needed nearly 24/7, and he was going to be starting a new job on June 28th. The cabin we wanted would also only be available for so long and we knew that once he started work the chances of us being able to take a vacation so soon after that during the summer would vanish. We knew the timing would be dicey but we managed to squeeze it in this past week without too much havoc, so off we went on Monday.

After we got to our beautiful little cabin right on the beach we decided to walk out toward Haystack Rock even though it was late in the day and a bit windy and cloudy. For those of you who are our age you already know Haystack Rock — it’s the huge rock that One-Eyed Willie’s ship sails away from at the end of The Goonies. We picked a spot on some driftwood trees and just sat taking in the view with a little chit chat. All of a sudden, Matt got down on one knee and took out a ring, and he asked me to marry him.

So, yeah, our trip was pretty freakin’ awesome.

The ring is one that Matt designed himself and had made at a Seattle jeweler — he couldn’t find anything, he said, that fit his definition of The Right Ring, something that he knew was totally me. So, being that he’s an artist himself he decided to design it. The jewelers apparently balked at first but he said, “just trust me, guys, this’ll work.” Apparently at the end of the process they were suitably impressed and loved the ring so much that they took photos of it for their portfolios. It’s definitely gorgeous.

My beautiful ring. Yes, my hands look withered and old -- I blame the week of sand and surf and northwest wind.

There was a yarn shop in Cannon Beach, Coastal Yarns, that of course I stopped in. They had this huge hank of locally-produced 100% silk yarn in what I thought was a beautiful sea-ish color, a light, airy blue that really stuck out to me. I thought, hey, I could knit a shawl with this. Then I thought, hey, I can knit a wedding shawl with this — it’s not only knit from yarn bought on the trip where Matt proposed and is the color of the sea, reminding me of where we were, but it’s also blue, an essential component of any wedding assemblage!

1000 yards of beautiful sea-colored silk yarn.

I spent a day wondering if instead I should spin the yarn that I would knit a wedding shawl out of, in order for it to be more personal. Eventually I decided that, no, occasionally it’s perfectly acceptable to use yarn you didn’t spin yourself to knit a very personal item when that yarn has a bunch of other factors that mean something to you — in this case that it practically shouted at me in the store as being perfect in every aspect, from the fiber content to the yardage, from the color to the place and circumstances under which it was bought.

We’re more excited than I can convey in a mere blog post and we have some planning to do because we don’t feel the need to wait long. We still have people to update and things to plan. Exciting!

Making Stuff, Weeks 22 & 23: Cozy Toes!

It’s been slow-going because of crunch time at work, but I finally have a skein of Cozy Toes 2.0 sock yarn.

Cozy Toes 2.0 yarn in the Old Benz in the Sea colorway.

This is 2.0 because if you’ll remember I did a first run with some Falkland, but since it wasn’t superwash I knew I wouldn’t want to use that regularly for sock yarn. So I went with a superwash Blue-Faced Leicester combined with some alpaca from my boy Benz and some nylon. I dyed this batch with turquoise and chartreuse and, voila…the Old Benz and the Sea colorway. I struggled to find a name for this colorway until Matt suggested it, saying that it reminded him of the sea and it fit with my naming convention of including the alpaca who contributed his fiber.

It’s plied in a standard 3-ply. I know that most people do chain ply when spinning multicolored rovings for sock yarn, and I do sometimes do that if I really want to preserve a color scheme. I find that not only is a standard 3-ply easier to do and is a true 3-ply, which makes it sturdier (a chain ply isn’t a true multi-stranded yarn since it’s one single plied back on itself), but I enjoy the way colors interact in a standard 3-ply, frequently doing so in unexpected ways. For instance, there was quite a bit of blue in the roving but it doesn’t stand out as much as the green, something I can keep in mind for the next batch. I’m enjoying comparing all the chain-plied yarns I did in the past to my recent batches of standard 3-plies and learning from that experience.

I’m off to Oregon next week and I’m planning on taking the skein with me to begin a set of test-run Cozy Toes socks. After all, I have to try a finished product before I can begin selling the yarn to knitters! Once I knit the socks my plan is to throw them in the wash several times and see how they react — I’m curious how the amount of alpaca in it will affect the socks in the wash.

Want to see what other cool things people are doing with fiber? Check out WonderWhyGal’s Fiber Friday, a monument to all things fibery!

Making Stuff, Week 21: On Imperfections vs. Character.

I’ve spent all my fiber time this week knitting instead of spinning because I’m in love with what I’m making and I can’t wait to finish it: the Marmalade shawl from Ravelry in my Bamboo Benz handspun. I spun this yarn with no intention toward any particular project but with the idea that I might want to put it in my Etsy shop as I had just spun up a yarn of similar color (Silverton Sage), but when I finished I fell so hard in love with it that I couldn’t bear to sell it. It begged to be a lacy shawl and I hadn’t knit a nice triangular lace shawl in so long I was too anxious to wait.

The Marmalade shawl in Bamboo Benz (alpaca/merino/silk/bamboo).

I’ve been knitting it late at night when I’ve come home from work or when I have a few minutes in bed before sleep — both done in admittedly poor light (I’ll usually knit while Matt plays a game in the living room). Today I did a little knitting at lunch to get a break from the PC and so I got a chance to notice it in natural light. The color is gorgeous, the hand of the yarn is beautiful, and I’m going to love this shawl. But there were a couple of areas I noticed where the yarn had slubbed just a little bit as I spun it and at the time I didn’t really care. After all, I didn’t have a particular project in mind, just a fingering weight yarn. But even without a particular project in mind I did have a particular yarn in mind, and that yarn didn’t include slubs. There are two that stand out on the shawl and when I looked at them at lunch I tried to decide how I felt about them, and about imperfections versus character in spinning as master craft.

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Our First Shearing!

Yesterday was the very first shearing for our new little farm, The Glorious Grazers! Well, first shearing for the humans; the alpacas have been through this a few times. I was nervous but excited and looking forward to learning a lot about the process and how to properly skirt a fleece. The shearing took place at Jo’s Fleece Fields, who book shearer Bruce each year for the whole weekend and invite the local farms to book some time to bring their own alpacas for shearing.

Since we only have our three boys and we don’t do shows we don’t have a trailer, but Don and Jo had offered to lend us their trailer — in which case we’d take our boys up and also make any necessary stops at other farms for more alpacas along the way — or come pick up our boys. They dropped the trailer off the night before and, with no other farms to stop at, we took our boys up around eight in the morning Saturday. I was nervous the night before; having been hit or miss on getting their halters on properly over the near-year we’ve had them now I was worried I’d have a rough start to the morning. But I vowed that I’d get over my fear of having it on properly and just do it.

So Matt and I went out there and he held each boy while I put on their halters. This time I did it right: I got over my fear of it being on too tight and put them on properly. They need to be tight or the alpacas get nervous that they’ll slip down and cut off their breathing. I did the finger check and amazingly, as soon as we had them on each boy was perfectly calm. What a change! Even difficult Cinnamon was a different boy with his halter on and properly attached. They looked at me as if to say, “see? Every time you put it on wrong and we thrash around, we’re just trying to tell you that it’s not on right!” Then we walked them out, they walked right into the trailer (mostly — Silverton needed a teeny bit of coaxing), and we were off!

Benz and Silverton waiting their turns. Benz looking sweet as usual.

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Making Stuff, Weeks 18, 19, & 20: It’s Color, Not Quantity.

I found about an hour these last two or three weeks to get a little bit of spinning in. You know, underneath the couch cushions and stuff alongside some loose change and a crusty Cheeto. It’s not much but I’ll take what I can get this month. But hey! There’s a light at the end of the tunnel and sometime soon I will have free time again.

I began work on the “Cozy Toes” blue-green blend that I carded up a few weeks ago. I’m absolutely loving these colors so far. The picture does some justice but honestly, you really just have to see it in person to feel that color pop.

Blue-faced Leicester/alpaca/nylon Cozy Toes single. One bobbin down, two more to go.

I’m anxious to move on to the other two bobbins, but I just love walking by my wheel and seeing that color spring out like that. I’m three-plying it traditionally, no chain-plying. While chain-plying would retain the color bands that’s actually not really what I’m after — I’m looking forward to a more impressionist-painting look (I hope) to the resulting strands all intertwining.

Most of the time these days I spin intentionally; I set out to create a very specific yarn for very specific projects and it’s actually pretty unusual for me to find myself wanting to spin something just to see what I get. But that’s exactly what I did with the green meriboo/Benz alpaca/white merino/silk blend I carded up and spun as a two-ply fingering weight. I just wanted to see what I’d get and wow, I’m really happy with the results.

A meriboo/Benz alpaca/white merino/silk 2-ply fingering weight yarn. Just my color!

On the surface it probably doesn’t seem much different from the Silverton Sage yarn I spun up a few weeks ago, but it’s actually quite different. It’s softer (incredibly soft, in fact) as it’s a flatter 2-ply yarn and not the slightly-overspun, round 3-ply yarn that Silverton Sage is. It’s also a fingering weight yarn so it’s a much lighter gauge. And the color is a bit darker and more gray, which I really like. I’m finding the blends I’m creating with Benz’s black fleece to almost be the most interesting blends because the addition of some of his black fleece in the right quantity does things I don’t really expect. As a UI designer my color work has always been on a monitor; I have virtually no experience with painting. But paints are what fiber and dye combinations mimic and it’s been fun to see how the addition of some black can take a color and really pop it rather than mute or darken it a whole lot.

As you can see, I was so anxious to knit with this that I didn’t even take a proper picture of the loose, tasty hank before I wound it up for knitting. I’ve decided to knit the Marmalade Shawl with it as I ended up with a scrumptious 300 yards (practically on the nose). I’m planning on it being a bit smaller, more of a loose-mess triangular scarf around the neck. That’s if I can get past the cast on, which I fussed with late last night and had to rip out as I found it a touch confusing.

So, not much in the way of quantity this week but I think I’ve more than made up for it in color, don’t you think? I’m anticipating having a little bit more time soon to finish this yarn and I’m really motivated now to do that. But in the meantime, why not go check out the other Fiber Friday posts at Wonder Why Gal’s blog?

Making Stuff, Week 17: When You Can’t Spin, Dye.

I want to preface this week’s “Making Stuff” with a pointer to a wonderful article I read on the increasingly interesting Make And Meaning blog collection. Paul Overton, author behind the quality Dudecraft site, wrote an inspiring article about the relevance and importance of handcraft and hands-on work. My favorite quote from the article is this:

The problem is that, over the last thirty years, we’ve devalued handwork to such an extent that we’ve begun to equate dirty hands with weak minds. We’ve put so much emphasis on knowledge work and made labor such a dirty word that now we don’t even have enough mechanics to fix our cars. Instead of acknowledging the fact that every kid is not going to fit into the advanced placement→college degree→knowledge work equation, we’ve pushed and cajoled and squeezed them into what we think are socially acceptable, middle class professions because, you know, god forbid they turn out to be happy, blue collar workers.

This is a sentiment that I, and I think every handcrafter, can really identify with, even if we aren’t making a living with our handcrafting skills or even want to. It’s the idea that this is work to be valued, that it’s not something done because someone failed out of prep school or was never considered smart enough to get in in the first place. It’s a great article and I won’t rehash it here, I’ll only suggest that you read it right away as he has some great ideas for remedying the current perception of work and physical labor.

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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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