The Thing About a Blog

The thing about a blog is that it constantly wants feeding and caring for.  It's like a pet but with a different set of daily chores for it.  I do occasionally think about stopping but the truth is that I need it.  It is part of what I do, part of the routine that has come to frame and form my days and weeks and months and years, particularly since Brian has been gone.  It is hard to believe how long ago that is, and harder to understand how it only happened yesterday in my heart.  In a few short days it will be nine years  since that horrible summer.  

I can't wait for summer to be over.

The blog is going to go on a bit of a vacation for a few weeks.  Partly the vacation stops me from writing only about the long ago stuff surrounding that summer but it is also that I need to take a bit of a break for the heat.  Heat makes it really hard to simply be.  I have done all the medical stuff but the bottom line is summer will be over soon enough but meanwhile, my brain is tired.

I will be back though and will probably write a bit  even as  I take a break.  This is where I natter on and where I work through stuff.  It is where I sort out what I have done and what I will do.  Writing is where I say the things that I need to get out of my head and on to paper so that they stop whirling.  To stop writing at all would be about as easy as stopping knitting...yeah neither of those things will happen.

But a vacation is in order and so that is what I am giving me.   The thing about a blog is that it needs a vacation because I am my blog and in a weird way, it is me.

All White Dresses

I took out all the dolls today.  It just felt like the right thing to do.

My Auntie Lorraine collected dolls all her life.  She lived on the farm with her mom and dad and her unmarried brother and took care all of them as they aged.  She never married but was surrounded by and endlless range of neices and nephews.  Somewhere along the line she decided to collect dolls enough so she could give one to each neice and nephew.  As familes and things do, this goal grew and it soon became grand neices and grandnephews, of which there was also a never ending range.  As families do.  

My doll from her is a sweet little first Communion doll.

The photo is a bit fuzzy but it was a zoomed picture and I am not so steady as I would wish.   

She had one for each of us as well as her favourites that she kept for her own enjoyment.  She had enough to give her sisters each one or two as well.  On her passing, her sisters split up what remained between themselves and as special things do, they become part of the family lore that parents will pass on to you.  There is no real fancy furniture, there are no jewels, only lovely sweet dolls. And so my mom spread her collection among us.  

There is this lovely Bride Doll, which according to the blurb attached in the paperwork for her, inspired by Beauty and the Beast.  She is a pretty thing I grant you, though the story, not so much.  It does not seem to suit what I think we should be teaching our young things.  I will make a better story for her even if my hair is grey and the child in me is slightly older than playing with dolls stage. 

Then this sweet thing.  It is Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep and is one of the prettiest dolls I have ever seen.  A tiny sleeping baby with sweet feather wings.  

One of very few dolls that I suspect is in the wrong box.  Auntie was pretty careful about keeping the boxes and paperwork so this may be one of her older porcelain dolls where she did not know the value of keeping all the parts it was sent to you with.  I particularly like this little one because she has perfectly tear shaped eyes.  She may be mournful with her eyes filled with but she offers you her full heart. 

And then there is this ever so pretty little doll.  

 

She was tucked in with the sleeping doll and she does not belong.  If there are any of my sisters reading this, and you remember mom saying something about it at some point in the past, or if one of you or mom has a antique Victorian period doll who might be missing a dolly.  I will keep her safe but she belongs to something surely.   

All the dolls that have come to me have white dresses which strikes me as an oddity.  They often were brilliantly coloured and lavishly dressed but maybe it is like my collection of Christmas music boxes, accidental but kind of neat.  they almost all play the same song and no it isn't Silent Night.  Some gifted, some given, one bought, but all were collected with love by my auntie and her little sister, my mom.

I do have two others.  One made fully by one of my father's sisters, Auntie Suzie, using bits of my bridal gown and matching my veil and headpiece.  She did such wonderful work, and another which was the last doll she dressed, long after she could no longer paint a doll face well enough.  These two are also dressed in white.  All white collection!

Jumbled Words.

If you are a newer reader, you will notice in the car photo yesterday there seems to be a lot of books in the background.  Yes.  I have a library, a large and moderately diverse library.  

ignore cars, look at books.

There is the romance section, which lives in my bedroom.  It lives there only because there is room here for it.  The livingroom is short of walls to put bookcases against so that section lives in my bedroom.  They are old favourites for the most part.  Series by certain of the writers that were big in the eighties and ninties like Jude Devereaux and Johanna Lindsay.  I used to have many many more but as we moved, it just got to be too much.  I kept the ones I would reread and gave the others away.  There is always someone looking for good romances.

Then there is the cookbook section.  That lived in the dining part of the kitchen but we finally moved it to the side closer to the livingroom.  Again, if there was more space for bookcases it would be in the livingroom. The cookbooks take up their own not insignificant space.  As is, they are stuffed onto a half height Ikea Billy bookcase.  I still love paging through when I am mystified about what to make for dinner.  It is much more real to me that a recipe search on google.

I have a large section of history and myth for want of a better word, historical books that are more than fiction somehow and more than history. I  love well researched historic fiction, but I also love pure history.  The reasonably decent copy of the Anglo Saxon Chronicles or the Great Fire of London, a book so dry, it is not at all surprising that London burned.  Yes I have several McCullough (my most favourite voice in all the world)  but I also have Marcus Aurelias and smatterings of Plato.

I have a joyous fiction section, joyous because I read them all and will again and they are books I can travel the world in and still get resolution from when I visit them.  I have a lot of Agatha Christie too.  

In my very modern library I have a wide section of dvd movies too sharing space and place with books.  

And then I have books on plants and books on crafting.   The crafting are the ones that often jump off the shelves and litter the room.  They are so noisy, demanding to be heard and looked at and paid a-attention. to.  I am trying to knit something from each of them.  It is more than knitting though.  There are books of embroidery, and crochet, and colours for threadwork and 

So many more.

I could write more about the library, but without the books here to show you, it all is just jumbled words.  It is well into morning and it is time to get my day underway lest I talk only of books and never do the things they inspire me to do.

Too Nice a Knit to Not.

I ended up doing  zoom meetings yesterday instead of having to go out to appointments.  How great is it that Covid left us with the very positive societal change that some medical stuff is perfectly fine, done via zoom.  It left me with all kinds of goofing off time.

I mentioned that mom and dad were thinning out their treasures.  Today I will show you Dad's Treasures.  He didn't have thousands, but he had enough to fill a couple display places in his office. I think he stopped when he had the space filled, kind of like myself and my cheap blue and white china collection. This part of his collection will be shared out among the boys though I must say, there is one truck that makes my heart go pitter patter just the tiniest bit.

I took them all out to see them all in one batch.  I am waiting with what mom sent till I have a place sorted to put them.  It takes time to get them in and out of the boxes and I will be happy to do it in one fell swoop.

With the much quicker zoom consult done, I had lots of time to knit.  Not a stitch was managed while the kids were here, so yesterday afternoon was the most fun time.  I do have fun with the kids, make no mistake.  Fun with kids is sheer joy and giggles and hugs and silly kid jokes and watching them run outside and scream the world down as they play and it warms my heart to bursting that these great kids are my folk. 

Knitting fun is entirely different. It sits glowing inside your soul, warming even the darkest parts of you, with a message that this is who you are, Knitter.  There is such mystery in making fabric and in watching it grow off your needles.

I picked up my knitting again this morning after finally sorting out the oddity at the underarms.  If I did this exact pattern again, I would take a bit more care with patterning and just where I placed the underarms.  Oh but for a few stitches... 

Those few stitches will never be noticed by anyone but me and since I only see the whole of the ongoing sweater, it won't matter a bit that things are the smallest bit imperfect till I have a full repeat of the lace at the underarms.  The ongoing sweater looks great, even better than I hoped.  I am already calling this a complete success.

If you have never knit a Leisl, you should.  It is just too nice a knit to not.

Tour de..What, when?

And just like that, Tour de Fleece is done.  My whole de fleece is the bobbin and my almost finished plying of the turquoise and green gold fibre from Christine.

My goal was to make a dent and I did.  This is 180 yards or 165 m of Shetland single ply.  It is as even as I have ever spun and looks really quite perfect.  I spin well, and ply much less well.

This is the fibre from Chtristine, an over dye/misdye from Fleece Artist that she brought back from a Halifax trip for me.  I thought I was missing the first part of this spin.  I have been looking for it, literally for years.  It wasn't till I was plying that I realized what I did.  There was a very strong turquoise part and a green gold part.  I did most of the green gold part, put it on a storage bobbin and then set it away.  When I started spinning it again, I started with the green and gold, which was then covered by the turquoise.  And promptly forgot that there was green gold as part of the fibre.  As I was prepping for plying, I recongnised the green gold as part of another storage bobbin I had, and away I went.  I plied a solid turquoise silk wool blend spin with the start of the blue, and when that was done, plyed the green gold storage bobbin and ended plying the green gold from the main bobbin the last of the green gold on the storage bobbin.  In the end, I had just the smallest bit of single left, about 2 metres.   When I knit with this fibre there will be a distinct gradient, which I feel pretty pleased with.  

It isn't perfect.  What looked like plyed much too tight is still not quite enough so I will run it through the wheel agian to give it another bit of twist.

Also created during Tour de Fleece was this tiny floop of shetland bulky.  This was created on the s51 as I readied it for spinning on it's own and for plying, which is really the purpose for owning the wheel. Maybe 50 metres, all of needing work.

Of anything I learned while doing the tour, it was learning about the S51 and then learning just how great the Clampy Kates from Akerworks are. I have been afraid of plying for a long time.  I just felt like I was never going to get better with the way bobbins bounced around and would flip about or how the kate would come skidding to meet me if there were any imperfections in the wind on.  I just never felt I could get any idea of how they would behave and what I needed to do to make progress.  Each time I tried plying, there was disaster after disaster.  The Kates just clamped on and did their job, abley assisted by the tensi-tamers to keep the bobbin relatively steady on the post.  It was brilliant.  I could even resolve another small problem I had.

I have a bunch of toilet roll centers that are three times as heavy as usual.  The really are perfect for storing stuff if you are like me and have a plying pile as big as your blocking pile, your patching pile or your laundry pile.  I also have a weavers bobbin winder that makes loading and unloading these alternate bobbins a dream.  BUT, the bobbin winder was on a shelf that I could not get to till I put the sewing room back to order after the little boys were sleeping there.  Akerworks bobbins, with their flat pac technology can also do this.

Pretty epic in my books.

For the first time in a very long time, there is also a Tour de femme, which runs to the 31 of July.  If I spin and my team, the International Virtual Knit Night Wooligans, are in it, my yardage will be there.

Now you would think kids and kids going home and F1 races and Tour de Fleece would have been enough for a part of a week and weekend.  But no.  No it was not.  My sister was on a tour to Ikea and she stopped for wine and girl talk (that is if I had any real girl talk).  She left me with some things from mom and dad that I will write about in another post.  Treasure though the real treasure is that I still have my mom and dad.

But my sister also left me with this little present.

It is all of us kids, my brother and my sisters, sitting on a dock, wearing these very pretty sweaters, looking remarkably like oursleves, except that I, in the pretty yellow sweater, really ought to take up twice the butt space on the dock.  It could be a tree ornament or it could be a magnet on my fridge.  I have yet to decide which.  But I love that there is a knitting part of it.  That just means a lot.

Anyway, I must be off to get the day going. I did the early part but have appointments this afternoon, so busy busy.  But the best part of the day is yet to come.  When I get home I will knit,  I will just knit and that is the best thing of all.

kids!

I am a bit deviceless for the next few days.  If i post, it will be the oddity.  I am corralling grandkids and I love it.  

Forecast: grandchildren and more expected tonight!

I gotta go make pancakes.

Found Goods

After having nothing much to say when i posted yesterday, today, I have stuff and more stuff and things I had forgotten about and more stuff.

I had the tall guy take some stuff down for me.  I can no longer easily reach the top shelves, and I was going through all the things on lower shelves to see what could be merged or packed better so that everything could be in reach again.  the lower shelves were revealing.

Turns out I had a bit more fibre on hand than I thought.

I found these two very floofy airy unbraids (not braided but about the same amount of fibre) Having seen them, I even recall purchasing them from Jo's Yarn Garden back when I lived in Spruce Grove.  Wonderfully airy blobs of blue green gray.  I can't wait to spin them.

I also found this more firmly colored batch of fibre, in brilliant greens with punches of clear deep blue.  I have no idea when this was bought but I suspect it was along with the fibre just above.

And then a batch of much softer greens from West Coast Wools.  I think the blue braids above are also from them, because this is packed in the same airy manner.  These are all lovely things to be sure.  

And this.  Be still my beating heart, this still is an utter delight. 

 It was a little freebie from Fellview Fibres, who no longer is on selling etsy but is easy enough to find on her own website (the link is on their name).  She does such lovely work.

I also came across a bunch of things that need plying.

This was some from denim blue braids from Colour Adventures Falkland Wool Tops.  Just needs plying to be a finished project. 

A bobbin of red again a Colour Adventure fibre, Polworth according to Ravelry.  I had a feeling there ought to be more of this.

This bit of warmth is labeled unknown Top and so it remains, pretty but unknown.

This is from a bag of Northern Lights from back in the day when Louet sold fibre on their website.  I miss those days.

And then in a bag that I thought only held my most beginner spinning, I found some really great stuff.  

The oldest perfectly decent shetland.  Some of this really ought to be plied.

This one breaks my heart.  A friend brought this back from Halifax for me.  It was back when life was so uncertain and so torn and mangled that most days my head was not really all there.   There ought to be a second wind off of this, but I have never been able to find it after the very first of my moves.  And that breaks my heart.  I think I know what I am going to do to give myself the meterage I was hoping for.  More on that another time.

And then this bit of green which belongs with this bit of green

And with another bit of unrecoverable bit of singles that ate itself up while playing.  It is so beastly overspun and before I do anything more, that overspin has to be corrected.

 And then random redness of delight.  I found the other spool of red that goes along with the red above, as well as a peachy red silk and wool and another wool and silk.  

And a couple more random bobbins of various fibres, most likely shetland.  One is spun quite thin so it may be that I was pushing for a sock yarn?  I really do not know.

And that is what was just hanging out on my shelves. 

It has been fun finding these treasures again.  It inspires me to get these plyed and turned into yarn.  It might not be the most perfect yarn ever but these will all be decent useable things.  

After a weekend.

Why is Monday so full of ...Mondayness?  I'm retired and I guess I assumed that "Monday' wouldn't carry over.  It does, but then so does the weekend.  If you are retired, you can do all the things on any day so why the idea of weekends still remains so important in ones mind could be a bit mystifying, but for one thing.  Everybody needs something to look forward to, which explains weekends, and sadly, after something to look forward to, there is always a bit of a harrumph, it is over, which explains Mondays.  

It was a pretty good weekend though I currently have no pictures of it all.  I did some spinning on the s51 and it seems to be set up just right.  I am really just readying it for plying.  Today, though, I will be going back to the Vic and spinning with her to get the rest of this bag spun up and to get everything ready for the finish of the Tour de Fleece.  That is apparently only six days away so I must get moving along. Even if I did not spin a single foot more, I win my goal because there is a definite dent in this mass of Shetland fibre, but I will be a more content person if I get this plyed as well.

I am not particularly happy with the quality of my spinning overall.  It is so uneven.  I wish I were one of those smooth very fine spinners, though that doesn't seem to be me.  (At least not yet.  Maybe if I pull out the lace flyer and bobbins?)  My secondary goal for this particular batch of fibre was to hope for a DK weight end which could be turned into a sweater.  It is a lot to hope for from my spinning, but if it won't be a sweater, maybe I can get a couple hats. 

I don't know.  I don't have much to say.  Maybe later in the day after my chores are done.  It's floors day, which means everything will be swept up and the bucket and mop comes out so that everything can get a good scrub.  When that is done, I can tend to the much more fun things.  

"They wanted to know if Lady Eboshi was a good guy or a bad guy, whether Shishigami was a good god or a bad god.  Miyazaki built a film in which there are no bad guys, " He says, "There are only consequences. Lady Eboshi is providing shelter for sex workers and people with leprosy but the result of what she is doing is throwing everything out of balance.  "     

" Unclouded by evil, unclouded by fear, unclouded by hate.  You just have to see what is actually there."

Neil Gaiman on the Stdio Ghibli 25 anniversary

That feels better.  Starting something new just seems to have righted the world and I feel better for it.  Plus this last few days, even though it is hotter this last week than it has been all summer, the heat isn't killing me the way it has for the last few years.  I think it is the ginger.  So long as I do that, things go well.  Ginger is obviously affecting my mental health, hahahaha

Anyway, I sat knitting in the morning yesterday looking at my spinning wheels.  And suddenly the brake band and the rest of the brake assembly from the S51 were off the wheel.   

I have had this wheel for a while now, and I have never liked the way it was set up for the brakes.  The heavy, stiff leather gave me two brake tensions, all or none.  I learned to spin on a Babe wheel and its brake was a soft strip of leather over the flyer end, just as this is with velcro to attach it and to set how tight the leather should press on the flyer.  I copied that set up for this wheel and gave it a spin to see how it felt.

Close to what I was looking for but not quite right.  I could not go thinner than this fairly chunky single because the fibre still wanted to yank from my hands.  I only got this by treadling so slowly that each round was pretty much a restart.  It wasn't making for happy spinning.    

The drive band is far too tight. 

I added about three inches and am going to give it a run and see if it is right. I am ashamed to say that I did not pull out the cracked drive bands to use as a measure for length.  I did not think of that till I was sitting here writing.  As Charles Leclerc said once said after a pretty easy to avoid crash "I am stupid, I am stupid".  But I will check now and adjust to that length.  So far as I recall, it worked fine with the old bands before the footman attachment broke. 

While I had the velcro handy, I also made a wee adaptation that I came up with for all my wheels.   I added a small piece of velcro close to the orfice to tuck the fibre onto, to hold it in place when I have to take a spinning break.  

The only other thing I really need to get organized is a place to put all the spinning detritus, the bits that are spun to tight that I tear off when the sinlge breaks, or the bits of straw that are still in the fibre(Yes, even in this really high quality stuff ).  Since I have been spinning again, these bits have no home and they are all over the place,  kitchen bathroom, stuck to the bottom of my feet, etc, but the worst is that they occasionally wrap around my chair wheels.  That is the fastest way to kill a set of wheels known to mankind. I need a can or tuck bag or something to tuck it into where the fluff won't fall out of like it falls off the table edge. 

And here it is, midday. I could be upset that I am still writing the blog at midday but writing today means my laundry, in the ensuite off my bedroom/study, has not had any downtime and I am now done with my personal laundry.  This is big news because even the sweaters that needed washing are washed!  Huge plus going into the weekend.

I digress.  The weekend looks to be full of joy. Here endeth the post.

Playing the Music

I ended up not pulling back all the way from what you saw yesterday. I wanted to see if my fall back worked while I still had the stitches on the needles.  I am really glad I did, because I finally thought out how I was going to make this all work. 

First up, the ridges of teal really are much more prominent than I had hoped.  I had just completed the second and wasn't sure what to do. What I had on the needles was not long enough to really see what it was really going to look like so I soldiered on and did one more repeat of the pattern rows.  

The more I knit and had these strong ridges of teal, the more I liked it and somewhere between ridge three and four, I figured out exactly what to do.   

I am going to keep the teal ridges for the whole yoke.  Based on how deep the yoke is at the moment and how much yarn I have used up, that will be one entire ball of the teal.  The body of the sweater, from the underarms, will be all green with no garter stitch ridges.   

Once I get down towards the bottom, I will bring back the garter ridges in the teal.  This is where having a blog really becomes helpful.

From what I remember, this sweater was a quick completer.   Yup.  According to Ravelry, ten days.  There aren't too many notes on Rav, but I can go back to the days I was working on the sweater for blog posts and my usual endless chatter and I should be able to sort out exactly how much yarn I used for sleeves, and how much I used on the body. Once I know that, I will know just where to start the bottom using the teal ridges again.  

It's lace and lace is always fun to work.  It is music without needing to play an instrument.  Knitting this pattern for the fourth time, feels like I am playing an old favourite and loving it all the more.

Casting On

I was ready to scream for something new to hold in my hands, and rather than just suffer and not enjoy the knitting of some truly lovely sweaters, I took action.

I cast on.  I knit a couple of rows and then I ripped it all out and cast on again.  And then I knit a couple rows and pulled back.  And knit again.  This is where I am right now

and I am about to rip it all out and cast on again.  Sounds fishy doesn't it for a sweater which I have knit four times already.  

The thing is that in order for it to work out to have a second great sweater in this yarn, I have to use a very healthy portion of the rich teal Diamond Llama Silk.  There is not enough of the green to do it without the additional fibre.  Part of the issue is that the yarns are the very slightest different weight.  I am not sure if you can tell it here but the teal yarn is shown as 7 WPI (wraps per inch) and the green is 5-6.  

I am not particularly daunted by this, but it does mean that if I used teal for a complete section of lace, it might be a good idea to go up a half a needle size for that part.  And yet, I don't really want stripes from it.  That would detract from the lace.   The teal would ideally accent everything, but it needs to be more than that, just for yarn consumption.  

  

The next cast on is going to be about making a frame of sorts.  I want to try making all the buttonbands and hems, cuffs, in the teal as well as making the rows which form the garter ridge in the teal.  That garter ridge will, I hope, make the teal feel very much part of the whole.  I am a bit concerned that having the button bands et al in teal might be too much of a good thing, so my final fall back position is going to be simply that if none of the above works, I will have teal ridges throughout and will just have a couple of teal sections at the bottom of the garment.  

In other less happy things, I have not kept up my spinning.  In the heat of the season, I suffer and spinning in the evenings is next to impossible.  I haven't given up.  I am still gong to keep on working on it, but I doubt that I will make it into the second bag of fibre.  Still, if I can get one bag done, that is the speediest spin I will have ever done on 225 grams and that is a huge victory.  

So time to be off and running.  There is wool to wind.  There is things to spin.  Plenty to fill the day and more.

That Middle Thing

I am in the middle of everything. That long middle that always brings to mind the Piggy in the Puddle story that my kids loved when they were small.

The first picture is true to colour.  I adore the way it looks and as you can see, it is looking more and more sweater like.  Photo two shows that I am about four inches from the underarm.  You cannot get more middle than that.

The green Elton sweater is a bit longer than this one but is very very middle.

In the middle, I dream.  In the middle I think of my stash and what I have on hand and the next thing I want to do.  There are times when a long middle is good because I can pull out ideas from years ago and shake the dream out and see how I feel about it still.  Or even better, does a particular yarn need a new dream?

I have been labeling the bags in my WIP bin.  They are mostly a plain cotton bag now and I like them, but it means each must be opened when you are trying to find something.  I came across yarn that I obviously meant to start working with and that I had forgotten was pulled out to the WIP bin.

These blue green skeins of bulky Diamond Luxury something or other are going to get used with Some Apple Green Debbie Bliss Bulky 

It will probably be another Leisl.  I love knitting the pattern.  I know how much yarn it needs and I know how I can work the second colour in without any problem.  Plus, in this yarn, the lovely lacy Leisl is one of my favourite things.  I have a blue one that gets ridiculously heavy wear.
 

But I also found this.  It is a wonderful Angora from Elsebeth Lavold.  I have just a thousand metres of the deep warm rust and a tiny bit under five hundred metres of the mohair.  

I have always dreamed this would be a short sleeved sweater with a deep deep v neck and a wide flounce of mohair collar.  I think the only reason I haven't knit it yet is that I worry that I don't have enough of the Angora.  Now isn't that the silliest thing of all.  

Days to dream of glorious things.  My favourite thing of all.

Is Balance really that good an idea.

I came here this morning feeling less than successful.  I haven't spun since Friday.  I have no idea why.  I just did not, but I had a lovely visit with the International Virtual Knit Night ladies.  I had a great chat about F1 with the other F1 fan before any one else showed up.  I find I cannot spin and chat with a group on the computer.  My set up is just too awkward for the double treadle so I knit instead.  

I got in some pretty decent mileage on the F1 blanket though.  No photos though.  It still looks like it did last time, but I can tell you, it is getting big enough that it is at the awkward stage where it is too big to hold proerly on my lap and the table top and not really big enough to tuck beside me to keep still.  Good mileage, but it will be a while till the blanket is done.

I knit on the blue Elton sweater.  I have about three inches below the underarm now.  Pictures next time out.  It is a great knit but it really does take a lot more time than the green version.  I have a bit of a deadline on it though.  I want Luda to have it and want it ready by the end of summer. Still it will take a while till it is done.

I have the green one on the go and I really can't wait till that is complete.  I just love how it is turning out.  But it needs more work to completion.

I have the very striking and lovely Starting Point Shawl.  I would love to work on it but the sweaters demand my time more.  There is a Bridgewater from the before times that I really want to finish but it too is not urgent like the sweaters are.  

I have all these beautiful things, where they are so far from completion.  Is it possible that I need a bit more of the instant gratification of small things?  Perhaps.  Maybe I should be digging into the bin of leftover yarn and knitting kids mittens just so I get the feeling that I am finishing things even though that just spreads out the time that all the other knitting will take to be finished.  

It is actually this.  Balance across a broad spectrum of crafting things seems to lead to things being completed more slowly Which leads me to question my pursuit of balance as a goal.  Maybe hyper focus is the ideal state?  I need to stop having goals and just do.

This morning I am going to be washing fabric.  I do that whenever new fabric comes in to the house or in this case, when you find fabric you ought to have washed when it came in the house. I like to have it all prepped and ready so when I sit down to cut and sew, I can just go.  I slipped on on that on a couple pieces and didn't realize that they had not been washed till after the cutting was done.  Two tops were lost this way.  Sigh. I am going through a bunch of things that I hope to get to sew in August and September for fall and winter wear, just to be sure they have been washed and readied properly.  

This afternoon I have an adventure with Spanokopita planned. Looking forward to something just a bit different and tasty too.  In between I have the fixing of the S 51 to do. I am going to lengthen the drive band by stealing some inches from the spare Victoria band I keep on hand and I am changing out the incredibly stiff brake set up for the easier to manage soft leather like my old babe wheel had.

And in between I will knit on socks in case I need a little instant gratification that comes with finishing a thing.

Balanced

Thursday was a much better day.  Things went well even if I did not accomplish much.  I rested, I took it easy but for some household chores that were backing up and I made a real supper.   If I still have gumption to cook a meal at the end of a day, it means it was a good day. 

Today I had a bit of a sleep in which meant that the race qualifying started just as my coffee was made.  I never got to blogging, and till the qualifying was done, it was time to start spinning.  And I did.

It doesn't look like much, but I have never had a bobbin so full as this after so few days and I have never had this much of a bag completed this fast either.  I will do one more days worth of work and then will transfer it to another bobbin to have it ready for plying when a second bobbin is full.  Or till the bag of fibre is all gone.

I did some more of the long neglected household chores, (further evidence of feeling much better than I have in a bit) and then I thought about things in my sweater chest that I am not really happy with.  

Two things.  I am not really happy with the very close neck of my version of Threipmuir and I really really hate the sleeves on my variation of a Gregale.  

I have always liked the sweater.  I wear it fairly regularly, mostly because it is a machine wash and dry sort of yarn.  There are times when you will tolerate anything just for that.  The sleeves have always been tight and over time, they have made wearing it less than a complete pleasure. I got a wee bit too agressive with decreasing when I was making it.  It's fine if you are just sitting there but reaching for anything and it binds in the worst way at the cuff.  

I decided that it was time to sort that out and make a good sweater a great sweater.

I can't take the sleeves right off and make it sleeveless.  It was knit top down using the contiguous method of construction.  You knit the sleeves as you go when you knit the top that way but I can make them short and sweet and turn this mid season sweater into a pure and true summer top.

And there you have it.  A nice short sleeve top.  From wearing it this afternoon, I can already tell that it is going to get even more wear now than it did before.  

It reminds me too that there is  dark burgundy purple in the stash somewhere too.  I could really use another knit top that was so easy to care for.  And it reminds me that I have some grey to knit a sweater for Keith, who does so much for me.    

It is late now, almost Saturday by the clock but I am waiting for my sheets to dry before my day is done.

They ought to have gone in the dryer after supper but oh well.  Some success, some not so much success.  That is a kind of balanced life too.

Blech

Yuck.  I had a deeply disappointing day yesterday.  I had a pity party too in public.  It isn't often I feel so defeated by things, but yesterday was a day.  

It is past and we found a resolution so the next time won't end up the same.  All is well  good enough and it is time to get on with the day.

Because my stress levels were not in a happy place yesterday, I decide not to spin.  There have been times where I knit under stress on a sweater and ended up having to take it out because it was such a different gauge. Spinning usually leaves me with then thousand bad joins if I am too tense. I think I would hate that for this project.  I knit on a plain sock yesterday and it was good.  It helped put my world back in order and it felt right to leave the spinning for today.  I did a bit of sewing but only the kind where blorphs and gagalores really did not matter.  Not all sewing, yes, even sewing, not all sewing has to be perfect.

So I am going to make an egg with toast for my brekkie and I am going to have another cup of coffee and then I shall spin for a good while and see what else I can get up to.

Time's a Wastin'

This is the perfect progression through the days, from coffee to water to wine.

It really was that kind of day too.  I tried spinning during my zoom knitting but just did not have the space to get the computer close enough to hear and visit with people and to have the wheel close enough.  I picked up my version of Joji Locatelli's Three Color Cashmere Cowl I really enjoyed knitting this and this lovely yarn gifted by a friend from a while ago is really perfect for this cowl.

I did truncate the striped section and I skipped the last lace section completely because my plan is to wear this in the house in winter on the days when my upper back feels a chill aka all the time.  There is a point where it ends up too long and as is I got very close.  But it is a lovely thing and I will wear it a lot.

I did spin in the evening, not tons, but I did reach my target half hour.  I think I am more pushing for the time spent spinning than getting huge amounts done.  I don't think I will ever be a fast spinner.  I am not a fast knitter either but I think my goal, the real one, is to simply make a habit and a dent in the vast amount of fibre I have sitting in the closet.

I was a little concerned about how thick it was most of the evening so I pulled out my control sample and checkd.

Not that the control sample is perfect but it is realistic.  If I can keep the spinning so the plied yarn will be somewhere on the sample, I can work with it in a knitted garment. Yesterdays work was nicely in the middle for the most part so all is going pretty well, I'd say.

Still time is awasting today and it will be another full and busy day for me.