Pearl after a bath

I went over my wheel Pearl with some fine sandpaper and a bottle of wood feed/cleaner today because she's going to be travelling just a little and needs to look good and I think she does! Her wood is really coming into it's own after some care and removal of old paint and decorations.

This was a good spinny week for me - Mary's package arrived from the Butterflygirldesigns Spindle and Fiber Club and it's a beauty. No pics yet but it's a flower shaped spindle of gold flecked glass and 3 oz. of Tuscany fiber which is exactly what it brings to mind..golds, rusts, deep reds and wood tones. It's 1.3 oz and very fast from the little twirl I gave her!

Our friends Nancy and Chris arrived last night from Chicago and it's SO good to see them! They are our first houseguests and the closest thing we have to family as a couple. They also brought Artemis, who is recovering from bone cancer and chemo with an expermental drug treatment. Artemis is 120 lbs of very loving Rottie and it is great to see her looking so good although our little dogs aren't sure how to act!

I am knitting a secret swap gift and knitting like mad to meet next week's deadline. I had started a pattern and it was looking very strange and scary so I opted to start something else less experimental for my swap partner. Once I finish I'll post a link to the pattern cuz I thought it was just the coolest concept EVER and it's very fun to knit!

I also need to post pics of the guest bedroom now that it's finished..it looks awesome even if I did do it myself! Jack has been busy with her new tools and made stretching frames for my spinning class on silk for myself and a new spinner that's joining me today. They are nifty and I'll take lots of pictures today.

It's a monsoon out there..I love the storms but jeez..I'd like to unload my wheel without trying to protect it.

Trying to keep up!

I've decided to 'try' and keep up a little with blogging here - there's SO much I'm doing, spinning, knitting and I've gotten really lazy about uploading pictures and messing with Blogger. Sorry about that.

This is Jack and our new dog renamed Sarah..they are howling at the moon together while Kasey looks on in amazement. (and me, I never heard a person howl quite like that)

This is some yarn I spun recently. An Etsy seller named Michelle is on Etsy as Knitkass. She is like the nicest person EVER in my book. She sent me a part for my brand new wheel I'd broken without ever talking to or meeting me! Wouldn't even take postage! I got her first handspindle from her store along with this fiber. It's hard to tell but it has a little 'glitz' in it also, and my technique is getting SO much better! Yeah!

This is my first spindle and fiber from the Butterflygirl Designs spindle/fiber club and I'm loving it so far. It's merino/bamboo/firestar blend and I'm going to do it in a SAL challenge on Ravelry. Again, the pic doesn't do justice, the fiber has this gorgeous blue/green sparkle to the bamboo that looks amazing with the black merino. The spindle is Italian Resin and I adore it.
Here is a picture of Sarah - she is ALL Jack Russell and has adopted me as her forever person. The former owner had her de-barked (ugh, I don't want to know details) but it's made her sound really funny, like she's sucking helium right before she barks, heheheh.

Other than this stuff, you can always find me hanging out around Ravelry, most often on the spinning boards. I'll try to get better about keeping up here!

Insomnia Sucks

Here I am at 3:52 am blogging. ?? Hello?? Normal people SLEEP at this hour. They aren't drinking coffee and wishing they could crank up the spinning wheel without making my partner crazy with it's adorable little 'click' as it goes round n round.

I think the fiasco with the alarm people has caused this. Yesterday he arrived 2 hours late to do our install. Ok, fine..you needed a ladder and you're clearly a kid. I began to have reservations but continued to do the laid back, nice client routine and listened to him explain that this was his first ever install by-his-lonesome. Uh-oh.

6 hours later he calls for reinforcement. God only knows what he was doing all that time since I was a little consumed with the new dog we just adopted. Her former 'mom' had come by to do a house visit and brought her because our first interview went well and she felt good about us overall. The reinforcement arrived, saved the day and left again. Now I've had this green kid in my house for 9 hours. NINE HOURS of a stranger, even worse a sweet, nice stranger that you can't be rude to. UGH. To top it off, they discovered in hour 8 that some contacts already in place on our windows were wireless. A call to our sales guy resulted in "Tell them the wiring for that is an extra $45 a window. ($45 x 5 above and beyond our quote means Jack is not a happy camper) We in the kitchen heard "I'm not mad YET but either you're going to fix this or you're going to experience MAD" They fixed it but jeez..it really pisses me off that the guy thought we'd just bend over and say thank you to over $200 in cost not quoted. By the way, the keychain remotes were never programmed. He was prepared to stay another hour (!!!, keerist Noooo) to try and do it (hadn't done that before alone either!). We politely kicked him out until today.

At any rate, the dog is a sweetheart. Her name is Hero and she is 4. She's a Jack Russell that immediately began to run like the wind with our other dog, Kasey.


I've been spinning ALOT. This is my homemade tensioned lazy kate, taken from a web pictorial (thanks, unknown web spinner!) and my plied, kool aid dyed yarn that I'm in love with.



Here's my new, gorgeous, huge diamond that my wonderful Jack bought for me. Speaks for itself.


Here is the DIY weaving loom I built because I don't have enough fibery stuff to keep me busy. I need to find more

Gone and probably forgotten!

So, yeah..it's been months, years, decades..whatever. I've decided that Ravelry has an adverse effect on blogging in general. I mean, either you've posted yourself silly discussing whatever knitting or fiber issue you have on their forums or already uploaded pictures of projects because of course, having those pics link from our photo hosting site onto Ravelry is just well..

Let's just say we love Ravelry *cuz I do* and leave it at that. I had a few friends nudge me gently about this old silly blog so I decided to update it a teeny bit in the interest of staying sharp. (blink)

I know it's been a long time but I've been spinning..whoooooo! My partner got me a wheel for my birthday and after spending a couple of weeks looking at it blankly in terror I've begun to spin. I love it! I've read alot about spinning and whats funny to me is that I could not handspindle (dropspindle) for 2 years more than a wierd twisting of a yard or 2 here and there. Once I started with my wheel it ALL began to make sense and I am totally in love with my wheel (Thank you, Jack, my love!) AND my high whorl spindle which is carrying some Icelandic in a brown beautifully but slowly!

Ok, Blogger is being a butthead demon (some things never change) so y'all are stuck with the awful pic of me spinning with the adopted dog clinging to me like I'm the second coming.